I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.
My take is that they had a unique value proposition at the beginning: "YouTube for text: audience and authors all at the same place, with recommendations and unified comment platform". But then it became apparent that they will not magically become profitable or bought, so they started with the crap.
The reason a lot of creators have bought into YouTube is 1) it's still expensive to host video elsewhere 2) there's constant noise around the earning potential (as misguided as it might be to listen to it).
Medium doesn't have the depth of content to become a destination wholly in and of itself as they don't have a critical mass of creation. All they needed to do was allow creators to make some decent cash, get a few wild "this author is earning a $1m a year, just on Medium!!11!1!1" stories into the mainstream, and suddenly you'll have an influx. Then, just don't be a complete arse to those creators and keep the cash pumping.
I don't really want more ads in the ether, but that would have been the most obvious way to juice it - have their own self-serve ad product from ad one, and the offer the options to remove down the line.
Instead, we get dialogue boxes.
It's easy for a story or two to go viral (as in, slightly easier than on other platforms). What's not easy is to retain that viewership. Similarly to YouTube, you could put weeks worth of effort into one article just for it to flunk spectacularly simply because the recommendation algorithm didn't like it in the first 12 hours or so since you've clicked "publish".