Just Rodents

43,000 Writers, 30 Unpaid Editors, and a GoFundMe

Inside ILLUMINATION, one of Medium's biggest publication empires

illuminated

"We introduced many editors and left his introduction towards the end, as he is extremely busy with a full-time job and orchestrating the excessive workload of his seven publications. We are grateful for his vision to start this initiative."

A fan could have written that about Dr Mehmet Yildiz. The actual author is Dr Mehmet Yildiz, writing about himself, in the voice of his own publication, explaining why he's saved the best introduction for last. It's humility with footnotes, and it turns out to be the perfect way into everything else he runs.

Yildiz is the founder and chief editor of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications, a network of Medium publications that by his own count supports somewhere between 36,000 and 43,000 writers, depending on which of his pages you happen to be reading that week. He also runs a stable of Substack newsletters, a personal website called Digitalmehmet, a Slack workspace with over 25,000 members, a discount bookstore selling his own 60-odd titles, and, as of this year, a GoFundMe.

The Ask

The GoFundMe is called "Neurostrategic Authority Building Service for Creators." It comes with a funnel diagram:

If anybody can explain what Neurostrategic Authority Building actually is, the comments are open.

The pitch is that donations will pay for "the administration, hosting tools, and marketing costs needed to host 50,000+ creators for free." So the ask amounts to seed capital for a subscription business, one he'll own and run, dressed in the language of a nonprofit.

To be fair to him, he's told you this himself. He's written a book called How I Architected a Charity Organization & Why I Will Run It Like a Business.

You can't accuse a man of hiding his model when he's put it in a title.

The Free Bit Is Real

It's worth saying plainly: the free tier genuinely exists, and plenty of people genuinely use it. Thousands of writers have had stories published through ILLUMINATION's publications who otherwise might not have found an audience at all. The Slack workspace runs. The editors, whatever else is true about them, do read submissions and do publish some of them within a couple of days when the backlog isn't too bad. None of what follows erases that.

But "free" is doing a specific job here: the wide end of a funnel that gets narrower every time you scroll.

The Maths of Free

Here's a number from his own onboarding document, the 32-minute "Master Copy for 2026" FAQ every new writer is meant to read: around 2,000 drafts sitting in the ILLUMINATION backlog at the time of writing, because roughly 30 per cent of submissions are AI-generated slop his editors have to wade through and reject.

Here's another: 43,000-plus writers, served by roughly 30 unpaid editors, backed by 210 further volunteers, with a 211-person Slack helpdesk on top of that. None of them paid. All of them, per his own words, doing it as "a give-back activity."

And on the registration form itself, the one you fill in to join this free, give-back community, there are three separate ways to give him money.

A Ko-fi tip jar.

A WordPress subscription widget offering $1, $3, or $5 one-off, or $5, $15, or $100 monthly and yearly.

And underneath both of those, the GoFundMe embed, again.

Somewhere in the fine print of that same page, he explains that he "does not earn income from publications and does it only as a give-back activity."

This sits a few inches above a 30-per-cent-off bookstore, a run of Udemy course vouchers discounted 40 to 85 per cent, a WooCommerce shop, and a set of Automattic affiliate links, Jetpack, Pressable, WooCommerce Marketplace, Akismet, on which he presumably earns a commission every time someone clicks through and buys something.

The Upgrade

The Substack side runs its own three-tier structure, described in his own words as: free, $5 a month, or $15 a month.

For a limited time, he explains, anyone who signs up at the $5 tier gets bumped to a "founding membership," which he prices at $500 a year.

The $5 subscription is set dressing.

What's actually for sale is a $495 discount on a number that exists nowhere except in his own marketing copy.

The Lampshade

One detail that looks, at first glance, like an inconsistency: ILLUMINATION's rules ban AI-generated writing outright, no exceptions, several separate policy documents on the subject. And yet there's a publication called The Lampshade of ILLUMINATION, created specifically to house AI-written content.

The two policies stop looking contradictory once you see them as plumbing. The AI writers still exist, they still generate traffic, and the funnel would rather reroute them into an unmonetised side-pub than lose them to a competitor.

Nothing in this ecosystem gets thrown away.

It just gets sorted.

The Reviews

He has a Trustpilot page, 4.9 out of 5 stars from 74 reviews. One, credited to a "Dr Bronce Rice," reads:

"What makes this ecosystem truly unique is its foundation in generosity, integrity and a long-term vision for human flourishing... he is helping restore meaning and credibility to the digital space."

Nobody talks about a hosting platform like that unprompted. It's the same grandiose, virtue-noun-stacked register as Yildiz's own writing, right down to the vocabulary.

In the reply, Yildiz thanks Dr Rice personally and plugs Dr Rice's own Substack newsletter by name.

Everybody in this transaction leaves with something, except the reader trying to work out whether the review is real.

The Award

Then there's the "Top 50 Thought-Leading Company" badge, which he wrote an entire Medium article about receiving, opening with a Peter Drucker quote and several hundred words insisting it isn't a brag.

The badge comes from Thinkers360, which describes itself as the world's largest "opt-in" thought-leader marketplace.

Opt-in is the operative word.

By their own published methodology, companies make the leaderboard because their staff, who are Thinkers360 members, post enough content tagged to a category.

Posting is the qualification.

Thinkers360 also sells "digital award badges and credentials" as a way to "build, amplify and monetize your professional brand," which is a plainer description of what just happened than anything in Yildiz's own article.

The Bio

And then there's the bio itself, the one this piece opened with.

Forty years at IBM, Siemens, Microsoft, and NATO.

Multiple patents assigned to IBM.

A professional doctorate from RMIT spanning cognitive science, information technology, education, business, and leadership, apparently all in one dissertation.

Adjunct professor.

Postdoctoral researcher supervising PhD students at unnamed "several universities."

And, offered with no more weight than any of the above, fifteen years of eating one meal a day.

It's a CV built the way the funnel is built: wide at the top, so much coming at you that checking any single claim feels like missing the point.

The numbers move around, too, the same way they moved in every grift Just Rodents has looked at this year.

The 2022 version of this bio says 41,000 writers, 18 publications, 182 volunteer editors, 40 years of experience, and 284,000 Substack subscribers.

A more recent version says 43,000 writers, 23 publications, roughly 30 editors plus 210 volunteers.

Another says 38,000 writers, 17 publications, 45 years, and 242,000 subscribers.

A fourth says 36,000. Growth over four years is entirely plausible.

Four different, unreconciled versions of "the current number," all allegedly current at time of writing, is something else.

One Man, Or Many

Somewhere in all this sits a question worth asking plainly: is one person actually doing all of it. The publication-running side clearly involves other hands, editors like Aiden, Michael Broadly, and Gary Fretwell post under their own names, write their own pieces, run their own sub-publications, and the 30-to-210-strong volunteer structure holds up under scrutiny.

The writing output attributed to Yildiz personally is a different matter. Over 2,500 articles on Medium since 2019. More than 5,000 blog posts across two decades. A back catalogue of 40 to 60-plus books, on top of 50-plus more he says he ghostwrote for other executives. All while running a full-time consulting career and, by his own account, eating one meal a day.

Whole paragraphs of his marketing copy, the "give-back activity" line among them, turn up word for word across multiple pages written months apart.

Whatever's producing that volume, it isn't one man typing alone every evening after work.

The Farewell

In January 2025, he announced he was done. "This Is My Last Story on Medium Until the Algorithm Is Fairly Adjusted," posted after Medium's spam filter flagged his own writing, a system he otherwise relies on to reject the 30 per cent of ILLUMINATION submissions he says are AI slop.

He seemed genuinely wounded by it, "I did not anticipate being labeled as a spammer."

A fellow ILLUMINATION writer marked the occasion with a tribute piece comparing it to "being accused of cheating on a test you didn't even know existed."

Another follower posted, unprompted, two days later: "I have already miss my mentor Dr Yildiz. I hope he will come back and join the rescue club as he is very talented rescuer."

He returned that March, added a note to the top of the original calling it "an artifact of the incident," and kept publishing.

The Good Piece

Not everything here is a pure grift. In July 2026 he published a genuinely careful 6,000-word chapter on the p53 gene, the so-called guardian of the genome, and the biology holds up. The Nature-family paper he cites is real. He explicitly warns readers off commercial "p53-boosting" supplements and is unusually disciplined about separating what's been shown in a petri dish from what's been shown in a person. Credit where it's due.

But even the good piece can't help itself. It closes with the same 60-book catalogue and the same publication list as everything else, and the comments underneath it read like they were written by someone auditioning for sainthood.

One, from "Dr Michael Broadly, DHSc," reports getting "goosebumps all over my body."

Michael Broadly is a senior ILLUMINATION editor, and the author of "The Strategic Move: ILLUMINATION Community's Commercial Arm for Charitable Success," the 2024 article that announced the network's commercial services strategy in the first place.

The science is sound.

The applause is in-house.

The Verdict

Steve the Hypothetical Gerbil was asked to review the funnel diagram.

He looked at the tiers. He looked at the 43,000 writers and the 30 unpaid editors holding them up. He looked at the Ko-fi jar, the WordPress widget, and the GoFundMe, all three sitting on the same page under the words "free service."

He did not call it a charity, and he did not call it a scam. He said only that he'd like to see the books.

He is, as ever, still waiting.