For the past ~3 weeks Medium has blocked virtually every article I wanted to read and is asking me to pay. Most of these are programming tutorials related to some obscure Rails features. Honestly, I feel like Medium is the worse place to put your content. EDIT: For context, I don’t mind people monetizing their content, but in that case I’d rather pay them directly (like GoRails), and not a “subscription” for somethin…
The author decides whether the article is accessible for free or not. If the author is not in the partner program, even all of his articles are accessible for free. Read https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 section What does the checkbox do
The average article we publish does 10k views, which for most authors is way more than they'd get self-hosting and posting out to Twitter/FB.
I think also that Medium is still overly dominated by user generated content, i.e. what people here are calling low quality articles. You'd think of that content differently if it were better curated and better edited.
But all of Medium's subscriber revenue gets reinvested in their content. Most of that is author payments, but also they pay copy editors and curation editors. What they haven't done in programming yet is pay for any articles that have had a proper high quality edit. In programming that's a story editor, tech reviewers and a bug/errata updating process. But I suspect that will change because the subscription numbers are starting to be big enough that they can afford to invest in these things.