For some reason everyone around me was treating it for a while as if it was a curated source of high quality writing (and I have seen people brag about writing Medium articles). I am still confused how anyone saw it as anything more than a blogging platform.

It was a very minimalistic and tidy UX in an age of pop ups, ads, bloated menus, unecessary features, etc. it was great for reading and for writing

Then it became all of those things. It has the distinct stench of a growth team making all the classic short term moves to boost DAU

Like many VC-backed startups I think it was a bit of a darling for a while and then there was the inevitable realisation that something needed to change if it was going to have a viable business model.

That's the charitable version. After all, they did amass a decently sized userbase in its darling stage, all ideological and disruptive as it was.

Now it's yet another domain I exclude from search results.

It went downhill since its launch. Some things that I enjoyed when it came out.

1. it had any easy way to bring on board a collaborator to help out with a draft article (without them needing to create an account, for example).

2. it had a clean and minimalist UI, and better editor experience than tinyMCE and other popular editors at the time

3. while the curation process wasn't open (as far as I recall), I was expecting it to lead towards a centralized blogging platform (a la reddit) but where personal submissions are front and center.

The VCs poured a ton of money into paying popular writers to write on Medium, which got a lot of attention. That lasted until everyone learned that the VCs needing to cash out meant that Medium needed to sell ads and behavioural data, and that also meant that user-hostile things like dark SEO patterns were seen as necessary.

It did somehow manage to have a lot of good content, but it made it too difficult to access. I haven't looked at any Medium stuff in a long time, but if I recall correctly highlighting text wouldn't allow you to copy it, but would allow you to tweet it. Infuriating if you want to save a link to it and a snippet someplace for your own use.