The author argues that Medium attempts to imitate all-you-can-eat model of Spotify and Netflix but for written text. This model depends on grabbing attention as much as possible by random stream of articles each providing small dopamine hit instead of providing long term value to determined readers who are willing to put in work to digest complex long-form content. Currently they also don’t allow you to connect back to your followers. This means it’s hard to build tribe of serious audience, forced to write simple attention grabbing short pieces and depend on vitality lottery/luck factor to get paid.
A book deal is decent money, seemingly everyone gets an advance in the $200k range. But more importantly, it's a huge career level up for someone like Tiago. Every activity that doesn't build up your mailing list ends up being kind of a waste of time.
I suspect that Tiago could actually make more money on Medium publishing behind their paywall than he's going to make in his personal subscription program. But it's not enough that it should be his focus.
Also, I assume incentives will change again at Medium down the road as they keep trying to make the deal work for more and more authors. So maybe he'll come back, if just to cross post.