I don't remember the beginnings of Medium, but I vividly remember Quora back in the day. It was full of successful CEOs, entrepreneurs, subject matter experts, scientists, etc. It was THE place to ask a question if you wanted high quality responses. Now, it is just a Google spam and growth hacking platform.

I guess the difference here is that low-quality content (however you care to define) mostly won't be paid for and likely won't even be seen. The concept is interesting although I for one am very selective about the things I subscribe to. (And I'm also pretty newslettered out in general.)

Let me tell you a story about Yahoo answers...

>IIRC Medium was like this too in the beginning.

I think that's right. And one of the things that made Medium attractive to me to cross-post from my own blog to every now and then was that people who mostly didn't know any better saw the overall quality and assumed that there was some filtering going on. Which in turn made it seems more authoritative than a "blog." I stopped bothering once the quality went down and the paywalls went up.