load it up in a private tab my dude and thank me later!
Edit: OK, I just answered my own question. At the top it says:
"You have 2 free member-only stories left this month. Sign up for Medium and get an extra one"
You only get ONE more story to read after signing up? That's very misleading.
Lots of sites would like to make the paywalls immediate, but they won't get ranked highly on search engines if they don't show the article's content to a web crawler.
So the usual approach is to load the content, then hide it as quickly as possible if an unauthorized human is viewing the page.