What was the attraction to Medium in the first place? As someone who doesn't write article I wouldn't have noticed if all the Medium articles I'd read had been on Wordpress.
Edit: and I agree with what some others are saying. By hosting content from multiple publishers, they were able to provide some unique features for both publishes and consumers. Publishers benefitted from discoverability because Medium would surface related content around the platform to consumers, and they also benefitted from readers having platform-wide accounts where they could interact frictionlessly with blog content and kind of give content upvotes. On the consumer side, it kind of made Medium a good feed to watch for personalized blog content as well as the frictionless interactivity.
IMHO, the product pretty much when downhill as soon as they started nagging readers. The entire benefit to a reader was simplicity, cleanness, and a lack of distractions. Now it pushes the app and login so aggressively, people feel like giving up and pressing back. Wordpress could do what medium did, but Wordpress was focused on freedom of design, not a standardized reading mode. Also the medium editor is basically the same interface as reading mode.
If you want a rough equivalent of the early medium experience, minus the metrics, see https://telegra.ph/
After what happened with FreeCodeCamp I decided to not write there anymore.
> “freeCodeCamp is the biggest publication on Medium. Our open source community sends Medium about 5% of their total traffic. But over the past year, Medium has become more aggressive toward us. They have pressured us to put our articles behind paywalls. We refused. So they tried to buy us. (Which makes no sense. We are a public charity.) We refused. Then they started threatening us with a lawyer.”
As you can see only 8% came from inside Medium.
But with the departure of https://hackernoon.com there just isn't much geeky content to motivate visiting, and I never cared to subscribe.