Well, my impression from the start is that Medium was much more of a "we want to try some new things for blogging and see what works" model; the assertions Ev a

Well, my impression from the start is that Medium was much more of a "we want to try some new things for blogging and see what works" model; the assertions Ev and company have been making that they're on a noble mission to save the web from itself are relatively recent. They didn't set out to solve the impossible; they set out to apply what they learned from Blogger to do something better. I think an argument can be made that Ev is right that the advertising model for web content is broken, but there's no sign that they have any idea how to fix it. My own posts on Medium perform wildly inconsistently -- views from highs around 45K to lows around two or three dozen -- and at least for me, the main differentiator seems to be links from outside Medium. Articles that get selected for attention by Medium editors also get increased traffic, but I suspect it's hard to get that attention unless you're already getting recommendations. I'm enjoying a lot of things about Medium, although 2017 may be the year I quietly move all my stuff back onto my own platform again, just cross-posting certain articles over to Medium.