On a typical day when I see a link to an article with Medium in the URL, I tend to skip it and think the reason for this is subconsciously I don’t like how hostile Medium has been.
A great example is this morning. I was checking my Twitter stream and seen someone I respect share a link to a Medium article. I read it, then went into the comments, and then went back to authors bio and thought I’d check out some of their other work. That’s when I got hit with this.
Does the author know Medium is doing this? Do they care? I have no idea but as a content creator, it offends me Medium would do this.
I know many people use Medium because it’s easier to gain readers but I’m not sure I believe that. Even today search engine traffic dwarfs social, so don’t let the focus on the short-term cloud your judgment.
You are free to put your content wherever you wish, but I’d recommend buying a domain and host it your self. Most of my readers are developers so this is easy for them, and those of you that aren’t you can buy a domain and use an existing paid service. WordPress, Squarespace, Ghost, etc.
All this mirrors what the news media is going through with Facebook. They’ve come to be so reliant on a service they don’t pay for and they don’t own. The old business adage fits perfectly here. Don’t build your business on someone else’s product.
Eric L. Barnes 
I think they do know that this is going on. I believe it only happens when a writer becomes a partner and creates a sponsored/paid for article and I agree that it gets irritating. There is a way to avoid the paywall and that’s to use private browsing as the free-view count is cookie based.
If people want free blogging plus their own secured domain name, then they could even use GitHub pages and Jekyl or some other static site generator. They could even go slightly further and use Netlify to help build their static websites. The possibilities are now endless and people need to stop being going with “the next best thing” and start using their brains and think what’s best for their users and themselves.
LikeLiked by 1 person