Medium is not the home for your ideas

All of the pundits complaining about “cancel culture” are themselves constantly demanding that various things be “canceled” (fired, taken off the air, defunded, boycotted, deported, imprisoned, ...).

Not in every case, but as a general rule, “cancel culture has gone too far” is a hypocritical euphemism for “I don’t like it when people call out my bigotry”.

There's some history re-writing going on here. The tweet from Medium about unblocking his account was in July 2018 - the author replied with 'Happens. No worries. Thanks for resolving the issue guys', so they clearly weren't too bothered about this at the time. They then went on to post over ten further articles on Medium over the next six months - again, hardly the sign of someone annoyed by the platform. (for contrast, they had only written one earlier article in the year, so his output increased after the issue)

...and now in July 2020, two years on, they have decided that this was the thing that stopped them using Medium? How is this anything but a lie?

From their perspective, it makas sence because otherwise the App Analytics would pick up that there is this thing called coronavirus and is popular so from business perspective they should target it and the search results would degrade. Then the analytics would pick up that testing positive on Covid-19 test app has a good conversation rate and people would make apps where you test positive(or whatever goes. conspiracy theories, denialists - anything that brings eyeballs). This is essentially what happened with the News market. Analytics showed what kind of news people like and publishers made the news that people demand. They simply wrote the articles that brought most eyeballs.

When you own the platform, then it is your responsibility to spread it. Good luck with that, you can be a good citizen or conspiracy theorist and it is all fine until you succeed. If you are the "undesirable" and you actually succeed then people will start talking how to block your platform. You can be undesirable by telling the truth(journalism) or invoke trouble(shootings, racism and so on).

Owning the platform is not going to be the solution, it will simply delay the consequences.

That's the thing - they're not being 'forced' to host content. They willingly offering a service to host all and any (at least legal) content. If they're no longer willing to do that, then they're no longer a neutral Internet service provider. They're a private publisher and morally opinionated content moderator, like Facebook. That makes them no longer a provider of 'free' and 'open' Internet.

Perhaps a solution that makes everyone happy is strong / privacy layered end-to-end DNS encryption in a way that Cloudflare never sees or can control the delivery and allocation of website addresses based on domain queries. Not sure if it's possible, but I'm thinking something like Tor .onion site HSDirs and lots of cryptography is involved.

Also, people should just filter out the content they don't want to see, instead of everyone being forced to agree on what's good or bad as if they're all in the same one-size-fits-all boat.