Substack has much higher-quality content than Medium, but it seems to be moving in generally the same direction. There are already popups that disrupt reading on any article (sign up to the newsletter!) -- is eventual Medium-ization unavoidable?
Seems that way to me as well. The appeal of increasing metrics in the short term is far more appealing to a profit-minded organization than the invention of increasingly useful tools to augment the process of reading, writing, and distributing writing.