Because Medium doesn’t author anything. It’s as if NYT consisted of nothing but “letters to the editor” (without an editor and not in response to anything that was previously published, because they would be publishing nothing in the equivalent scenario) and then decided to put up a paywall.

There are countless free (and even ad-free) text-only hosting options available. Medium provides nothing of value to me as a consumer. It doesn’t even aggregates the content, people selectively post it to Medium themselves!

I say this as someone that pays for about a dozen online newspaper/magazine subscriptions but will never pay a penny to access a site like Medium or Scribd or Quora or any other site that does nothing but make money off being the middle man.

Anyway, it’s all moot as Medium will inevitably shutter or pivot. Their model is dead, the only reason people chose to post to Medium is because it offered some views. If those views are killed off by requiring a paywall, then Medium itself becomes defunct.