I read way less than I could because I don't want to spend precious minutes every day sifting through random articles. There's way less opportunity cost compared to Hacker News or even Reddit where I can get quality reading for not a lot of effort.

Yep. It's not really doing or saying anything to assure readers that they know where the quality lies, just giving the same 'media sucks, let's improve it' spiel that most publications start out with, minus the commitment a publication has to cater to its readers (donating through medium essentially gives up your control as to who gets supported, as opposed to the straightforward idea of donating to the publisher/writers you like directly).

I can't see many people as opinionated as medium users lining up to give up that control for blind faith in a platform, but hey, I guess tumblr got enough people to buy into the idea of their convention to fund their ball pit, so who knows, maybe it'll work out.