Medium's trashed their brand way before this. Likely the point where quality content became less of a concern than 'anything with words' and the staff decided t

Medium's trashed their brand way before this. Likely the point where quality content became less of a concern than 'anything with words' and the staff decided that promoted the vapid and overtly political was more important than finding decent stuff for their users to read. Of course, all these layout changes and annoyances have helped even more, so what was once a minimalistic site with a decent quality control standard is now just any old blogging platform with any old blogging platform's ugly awkward to use layout.