I almost always end up posting in the comments when I see Medium on the front page of HN, basically the same thing every time.
I've found the Medium experience to be quite good, and even world positive.
I'd been running a self-improvement group blog as an ancillary initiative to the rest of my business. The blogging was kind of cool, but not successful enough to think much about.
Then Medium asked if we'd be interested in professionalizing what we do. Medium's CEO and I both worked for the tech publisher O'Reilly early in our careers, so I think that's why he thought we could pull it off.
And so I've gotten to really experience the before and the after of Medium's paywall. Before professionalizing, publishing seemed barely worthwhile. And it only was worthwhile if I could make the posts viral enough and the call to action catchy enough. That's not really my MO, which is why we struggled.
Medium's CEO has made the case that free content has been deeply corrupted by these marketing needs. Maybe some people can opt out, but I wasn't able to. I absolutely was cutting short my effort as a writer and then manipulating the start and end of articles to serve my marketing goals (otherwise, I couldn't justify the time).
In the new system, we just write differently. We know the article is the product people pay for and we don't need to corrupt it with any secondary marketing goals.
I see this as a world positive, where Medium has been able to create an ecosystem that allows for deeper and more authoritative articles. If you're reading self-improvement articles on Medium, a simple judge is to ask yourself if the author has any 1st hand experience. The vast majority of the free side of that topic on Medium is written by content marketers who are experts in virality but are basically just making up or cargo culting the advice. (Literally, much of it is farmed out to Upwork)
Part of what drew in our subject matter experts was enough money to be worth their time. We're going to send more than $100k to authors this year (probably a lot more).
I'm trying not to jump in here to market my own stuff. What I'm talking about above is our self-improvement publication. We're also testing two more pubs on different topics, which I think says something about how lucrative we're finding the editing. But it's too early for me to say how those are going. I have a number of other biases here (small amount of Medium stock, Medium's CEO was on my board for a long time and was my boss in 2005), but I'm hoping people see my actions, which are to double down on Medium over and over again, to be an indication that I'm a true fan.