I'm not familiar with the workings of Medium, aside from the fact that there's a limit on the number of articles one can read for free each month.
> You’ll be able to get paid for all of your writing, some of it, or keep everything free and accessible to all. The choice is yours.
So it looks like the authors are the ones responsible for putting up the paywall.
OMG! The horror of it all. ;)
The thing with medium is I can write a tech post, and I may not get good reach, but I can syndicate it to another medium blog like the startup, and then it gets mega reach and I make like $100 easy.
I guess I could just repost my content on my personal blog and charge people like $10/month to access all my posts. Seems $5 though for a multi-publisher paywall is a lot more reasonable than say the wallstreet journal, or new york times.
Others (like self-hosted blogs or Stackoverflow) don't.
[0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011694187-Getti...