This article seems to miss the point of medium entirely. He fails to mention that you can be paid for content you create on medium, and content consumers don't have to sell their eyes to advertisers. Yes, they have to be pushy so they can acquire that critical base of paid users, but I'll take that any day over traditional advertisers.

Now, if you aren't interested in being paid for the content you create, then medium's goals might not be aligned with yours, so another self hosted platform may be better.

> it’s bad. Bad. Really bad. It’s not good, for any meaning of good you can imagine. There’s no person on Earth who could honestly call it at even partially good. Banners all over the place. Aggressive tracking and profiling.

Go poll 50 free users on the reading experience of Medium. Obviously this is anecdotal but almost everyone I speak to loves reading on medium. Compared to other ad-infested or high paywall websites, medium provides a incredible reading experience for it's goals as a for profit platform.