I never wrote on Medium, but having been a reader on Medium back before the rebrand and business model pivot, my impression is that it provided the entire platf

I never wrote on Medium, but having been a reader on Medium back before the rebrand and business model pivot, my impression is that it provided the entire platform at a time when it otherwise would take a lot of work to build, host, and maintain proprietary solutions to achieve the same thing. I saw a lot of companies moving their blogs to Medium, and they got to keep their domain name and branding, but you could tell it was hosted on Medium, because of the feature set. I think that the name 'Medium' really illustrates that. Medium was supposed to be the medium of choice to publish content on the web. It was everything you needed to get your message onto the web - serving the needs of content creators and consumers. Apparently that wasn't making any money. Now they are just predatory. Edit: and I agree with what some others are saying. By hosting content from multiple publishers, they were able to provide some unique features for both publishes and consumers. Publishers benefitted from discoverability because Medium would surface related content around the platform to consumers, and they also benefitted from readers having platform-wide accounts where they could interact frictionlessly with blog content and kind of give content upvotes. On the consumer side, it kind of made Medium a good feed to watch for personalized blog content as well as the frictionless interactivity.