On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.
imagine if other hobbyists could so easily duct tape a virtual point-of-sale to their display cases. imagine if a gearhead could put a card reader on their front door, try to get the public to wander in for 5 bucks and watch, ask questions. if she could do that as easily as us web geeks could, she'd try it too.
but we're the ones with the free access to try it, so we're pioneering this model of a hobbyist product that few will pay for.
I have yet to encounter a "premium" medium article that really made me think or change my views. Their auto-Google login, paywall, and other dark patterns are annoying at best. Given their actions and how I value their content, I think Medium is the worst kind of walled garden.
The Medium model is hot garbage, and I hope it dies.
Most of those things were and are maintained by unpaid volunteers, some of them spending their own money every month to keep the servers on.
Which is awesome. I applaud anyone who's willing and able to give to the community like that. But a lot of people now act like it's inherently repugnant to want to be paid for your work, like digital content shouldn't exist unless it's a self-funded hobby. I don't think that's reasonable or realistic.
Just to be clear, is it just Medium you don't like, or the entire concept of paying for content? I'm seeing both.
The NYT has a different business model, and is still partly supported by advertising in the print edition.
The digital content pricing race-to-the-bottom is really unfortunate. It's why we have shitty free-to-play mobile games, for example: people won't pay more than a few dollars for a phone game anymore, so a lot of devs have to find other business models to support development.
First: In the USA, a cup of coffee might cost 5$; in other countries, it is much cheaper.
Second: Every payment you do in the internet leaves a huge data track since there exists no analogue for cash for paying anonymously in the internet. So in particular if you are skeptical of data krakens like Facebook etc., you should be very cautious to pay in the internet. In particular, for each payment in the internet, you do not only pay with money, but also with lots of sensitive data.
But if you still don't like the coffee analogy, that's fine. The point is that $5 a month is not a lot of money for the average American. That's much less than the cost of a monthly newspaper subscription, and 20 years ago those were extremely popular.