They have made an honest attempt to pay writers. It's a different model than substack, but that's why.

I look at it the same way I look at pay walls for newspapers. I don't like them but I understand why they are there.

> The reading experience is abhorrent

Nothing you read in the browser can provide ultimately great and hands-down the best reading experience equally for everybody - the modern web model is inherently at odds with that. A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention. A plain-text protocol under user control is closer to "best reading experience for everybody". The web could be that. It mostly isn't.

I stopped trying to read long articles in the browser. Why would I do that, if I can easily extract all the relevant, plain text (and even structured one) and read it in my editor instead? Where I have control over fonts, colors, navigation, etc. The browser is a delivery mechanism, not a reading environment. Treating it as one is a habit, not a necessity.

Long ago I stopped trying to type anything longer than three words anywhere but my editor. Of course, why wouldn't I? It already has everything I need - spellchecking, thesaurus, etymology lookup, translation, access to all my notes, LLM integration, etc. Try it one day - it's enormously liberating experience. And then maybe you'd stop reading long texts in the browser as well.

It seems like it's just the latest evolution of the writer-friendly blogging platform; easier than Wordpress to package into a newsletter, and also easier to monetize with a paid tier.

It's a free, permanent host for your blog articles with a built-in community and monetization layer. There's only so many free hosts out there that I'd be confident will be around in 5 years, and Medium is one of them.

My best guess is momentum. Some people are very, very brand loyal and have to do things in relation to what/how others do things.

In reality it doesn't matter where something is posted, just give us a url, but some people don't operate that way.

check out Scribe an alternative medium frontend that's why better: https://scribe.rawbit.ninja/@NMitchem/if-ai-writes-your-code...

https://sr.ht/~edwardloveall/Scribe/ https://libredirect.github.io/

Yep, Medium was free and everyone donated content... then it put up reading paywalls and conned everyone, I'm also surprised when I see people writing on there.