Unfortunately Medium slowly turned into a incredibly frustrating & hostile user experience. I haven't purposely clicked a Medium link in many years because of it. I empathize with how difficult it can be to generate revenue from online writing, but I wish they figured out a better way.
It's like the difficult part is not to initially build a cool and snappy web service, but manage to remain cool and snappy over a long period of time, when money seems to want you to build something not-cool and not-snappy.
Something Medium failed at. Yes, they managed to solve the easy part (start out cool and snappy) but they failed at the hard and valuable part (remain cool and snappy).
There are several aspects of that site in its heyday that I've yet to find really replicated elsewhere, particularly for longer text discussions.
There was very, very fine level of access control over who could see what which meant you could require CONTEXT to be a part of a group. In addition, tagging support was robust and NOT just a mixture of hashtags. So you could do things like, in a politics group, click 'Elections: 2004' and see, in chronological order, every post related to that topic in the group. This made actual search possible and cut down on reposts/recycled content, because things weren't just lost the minute they fell off the front page, etc.
Then again, screenshot culture wasn't really a big thing, yet. I don't think we could replicate some of what made LJ work anymore. It's sad.
Meanwhile, Medium failed to create any kind of boom at all, despite its clean UX. They just kept the marketing/analytics cruft out of the product JUST long enough to attract a large enough audience, and then jacked everything up to 11. Standard bait-and-switch for 'free' technology products these days.