Some writers were attracted to Medium because it was easy get started. It was frustrating to me as a reader, because I was getting enough links there each month to hit the limit. I wished that writers would just set up their own site, which is also better for building their personal brand.

One interesting aspect of the Medium business model is that it can really deliver money for writers who get a lot of traffic. Medium effectively shares some part of the paid user subscriptions with all the sites they visit. So if you only visit one site in a month, they get all the money for that month. If that's a popular post, the writer might make a lot of money. But it depends on the subscriber not visiting many sites.

There is a theory that people will discover the writer's content just because it's on Medium, but that's certainly not how I find things. I follow links from social media or web searches.

If a writer consistently has a lot of good content, they will make more money at Substack, as they keep a larger percentage.

So the business model of users having a subscription to Medium as a destination site for discovery doesn't work particularly well. It doesn't benefit writers with consistently good content, and it doesn't benefit readers. So you end up with medium-value content that might get a windfall. It's kind of an SEO game.

Reminds me that I have hardly seen any interesting links to Medium lately, and I should cancel my subscription.