> But as Medium declines and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate that waits for every project, no matter how successful, and they leave behind valuable information for us.
This statement makes me so angry with Medium's corporate communications. It makes total sense to me that you'd think this, but I also think it's dead wrong.
The problem is that Medium is not clear that they've just straight up changed. So it's not that they are the big free open platform they used to be with an annoying "upgrade to pro" ad model on top of that.
Rather, Medium is primarily a subscription service. Even though they aren't saying this, it's best to think of them as an open-platform version of Netflix where anyone could post an episode or show and get paid for it.
That switch came with a switch in their incentive structure. The incentives for posting on Medium used to be that Medium will bring in a lot of traffic from their network. But they now limit that to articles that are published inside their subscription service. So there's not really any reason to post outside of their subscription service.
This is what I think you're experiencing: the free, non-paywalled portions of Medium are dying because the incentives for publishing went away and the aggressiveness at advertising their actual product (subscribe for, they hope, great content) has become more aggressive.
Meanwhile, while the experience that ElementaryOS was using Medium for is dying, there's a new experience that's quite good and I think plays a nice balancing role in the overall Internet ecosystem. Medium is making a place that rewards quality writing, tries to eliminate writing for the purpose of marketing, and is pouring money into authors and editors so that they can invest more quality into their articles.