Lots of things, but mostly misaligned incentives. On medium you’re a commodity as a writer and you have to drive traffic for ads. Your brand is devalued in fav

Lots of things, but mostly misaligned incentives. On medium you’re a commodity as a writer and you have to drive traffic for ads. Your brand is devalued in favor of the “medium” brand and medium’s interests only loosely align with yours (mostly they conflict). With Substack you retain your audience’s emails and Substack is fully aligned with helping you grow that audience and convert to paid. Everything they build is about that. It’s a much better model. This is the core of it imo. The general crappiness of the medium site is extra.