Do many people browse Medium like this? I read a decent number of posts there, but only because someone sends me a link or shared it on another platform.
I stopped doing both, though: you can't read too much for free, but more than half of the content was not worth reading (for me), except maybe for quick skimming. There definitely are articles on Medium that are gems (again, from my POV), but I hope them to be brought to me by social networks anyway.
For authors, though, Medium must be pretty valuable, bringing relevant readers, and maybe some ad revenue. It does have a discovery feature which may be not brilliantly great, but is still quite OK, especially if you have time to spend on lighter reading.
Not very high if you browse, but adequate if you get a link or two from other sources.
I wish they adopted the bandcamp model: quite a number of tracks for free per day, but you can instantly pay for the one you liked, the amount you like (above a certain minimum). This way, the articles I personally find valuable would be both easier for me to find, and paid by me higher than the slice of the common subscription funds they receive now.
I personally rarely click on them, but I can imagine some titles can be hard to resist. That make interaction-driven recommendations, which are becoming the dominant way of content exploration, a bit of a dark pattern.
Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.
Have you ever seen news sites that let you seamlessly scroll to the next article, by dynamically appending it at the bottom of the one you're reading, and updating your URL as you enter it? The ones where it's ridiculously easy to get lost, because scroll space keeps expanding (sometimes both ways) and the URL keeps changing?
Someone's gonna figure out soon that the code for loading those articles could use a recommendation engine.