Medium peaked a couple years ago, with many startups leveraging the audience and using it as a blog. I suppose their pivot into aggressive growth + monetization has lost them some really important publications. Arguably, hackernoon and freecodecamp were some of the most popular publications.

By removing the 'free' aspect of the content, medium effectively put itself in the same bucket as other platforms.

I also don't like medium's UX, especially the highlighting feature. It is really distracting.

It'd be cool to have a central store where users can publish content without worrying about uptime, paywalls or anything as such.