Never heard of PITA before, but I clocked its meaning straight away, will definitely add that one to my vocab, thanks!

I don’t currently write with HubPages, but I am familiar with the site. I will check them out more deeply now. Thanks for mentioning them.

And yeah, Medium is super up and down. I think the new referral programme is supposed to give writers more stability, but of course it’s slow to create a big impact.

Medium said (about 6 months ago) that they were going to start paying writers a small retainer of a few hundred dollars. I heard they paid it out to top tech writers, but I had heard nothing else since.