I never wrote on Medium, but having been a reader on Medium back before the rebrand and business model pivot, my impression is that it provided the entire platform at a time when it otherwise would take a lot of work to build, host, and maintain proprietary solutions to achieve the same thing. I saw a lot of companies moving their blogs to Medium, and they got to keep their domain name and branding, but you could tell it was hosted on Medium, because of the feature set. I think that the name 'Medium' really illustrates that. Medium was supposed to be the medium of choice to publish content on the web. It was everything you needed to get your message onto the web - serving the needs of content creators and consumers. Apparently that wasn't making any money. Now they are just predatory.

Edit: and I agree with what some others are saying. By hosting content from multiple publishers, they were able to provide some unique features for both publishes and consumers. Publishers benefitted from discoverability because Medium would surface related content around the platform to consumers, and they also benefitted from readers having platform-wide accounts where they could interact frictionlessly with blog content and kind of give content upvotes. On the consumer side, it kind of made Medium a good feed to watch for personalized blog content as well as the frictionless interactivity.

One thing Medium isnt getting credit for, that at its time was a breath of fresh air, was limiting formatting options. Similar to Facebook vs Livejournal/xanga/myspace, Medium took away almost all your formatting options, except the basics, and made it easy to insert media. Articles always looked good, and consistent, and you had simple metrics to gauge performance.

IMHO, the product pretty much when downhill as soon as they started nagging readers. The entire benefit to a reader was simplicity, cleanness, and a lack of distractions. Now it pushes the app and login so aggressively, people feel like giving up and pressing back. Wordpress could do what medium did, but Wordpress was focused on freedom of design, not a standardized reading mode. Also the medium editor is basically the same interface as reading mode.

If you want a rough equivalent of the early medium experience, minus the metrics, see https://telegra.ph/

I think the attraction for writers were network effects. It's kind of like YouTube for text content. Recently, I watched a video about the game Crokinole on YouTube. Afterwards I got a bunch of suggested videos: other videos about Crokinole, videos about other board games, videos about making your own Crokinole board ...etc. Medium does (or was supposed to) do something similar for articles, which in turn should lead to more views on your content.

I started writing in Medium because it was easy. Unlike WP it requires no maintenance and it looks good.

After what happened with FreeCodeCamp I decided to not write there anymore.

> “freeCodeCamp is the biggest publication on Medium. Our open source community sends Medium about 5% of their total traffic. But over the past year, Medium has become more aggressive toward us. They have pressured us to put our articles behind paywalls. We refused. So they tried to buy us. (Which makes no sense. We are a public charity.) We refused. Then they started threatening us with a lawyer.”

https://reclaimthenet.org/freecodecamp-leaves-medium/

It's all about exposure and discoverability, as Medium does as good job of effectively giving your blog 'free advertising' by recommending your posts to other users. It would be great if there was a decentralized way of doing this somehow.

These are the stats of my most read article: https://imgur.com/BAICxnm

As you can see only 8% came from inside Medium.

We should link to each other's sites and form a sort of web ring.

As a technical matter, the interface is posh.

But with the departure of https://hackernoon.com there just isn't much geeky content to motivate visiting, and I never cared to subscribe.