The "See also" links at the end of Medium posts, and the weekly "interesting for you" mail list were rather relevant to me, that is, often had links I was willing to click, and under those, sometimes were articles I was willing to read.

I stopped doing both, though: you can't read too much for free, but more than half of the content was not worth reading (for me), except maybe for quick skimming. There definitely are articles on Medium that are gems (again, from my POV), but I hope them to be brought to me by social networks anyway.

For authors, though, Medium must be pretty valuable, bringing relevant readers, and maybe some ad revenue. It does have a discovery feature which may be not brilliantly great, but is still quite OK, especially if you have time to spend on lighter reading.

What is the limit for free reading? I've heard this a few times now from a few different sources, but I've never run into it myself.

Three or four articles a day, I can't remember.

Not very high if you browse, but adequate if you get a link or two from other sources.

I wish they adopted the bandcamp model: quite a number of tracks for free per day, but you can instantly pay for the one you liked, the amount you like (above a certain minimum). This way, the articles I personally find valuable would be both easier for me to find, and paid by me higher than the slice of the common subscription funds they receive now.

Fairly late, but I must read eight or more Medium articles on a heavy day. The only thing I ever get is a modal prompting me to "make it official" and create an account.

I think the main avenue for exploration in Medium are the article recommendations at the bottom of the page, above the comments.

I personally rarely click on them, but I can imagine some titles can be hard to resist. That make interaction-driven recommendations, which are becoming the dominant way of content exploration, a bit of a dark pattern.

Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.

> Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.

Have you ever seen news sites that let you seamlessly scroll to the next article, by dynamically appending it at the bottom of the one you're reading, and updating your URL as you enter it? The ones where it's ridiculously easy to get lost, because scroll space keeps expanding (sometimes both ways) and the URL keeps changing?

Someone's gonna figure out soon that the code for loading those articles could use a recommendation engine.

Yeah but maybe (cannot be sure on this) other people are sharing the links because they browse Medium

Good point, that would be tough to measure.

All publicity is good publicity, I just typed in "medium.com" in my browser.