I'm leaving this idea in several places in hopes Medium will read it: We have to enter our personal taxing info in order to be in the partner program. Why can’t Medium use this information to control the bots? You can’t run a dozen or a thousand fake identities if you have to provide your real personal info. Force every member to provide relevant info that proves their real identity or their engagement doesn’t count. This will remove the incentive to make a bunch of fake accounts to generate fake engagement. There's no point in them doing it if fake engagement does not count. (You could still use a pen name, but you'd have to use your real identify to get an account OR you would know your engagement would not count toward writer pay).