Unfortunately, there's so much good content on Medium that appears at the top of Google search as well, but non-subscribers are deprived of such content.
At the same time, I see lots of discussion here on HN about how many developers care for the free and open internet. How is it then, that many developers write and contribute to such paywall websites?
And it's not just Medium. Many websites are built on top of Medium and they too get paywalled.
There is some, but it's mostly crap just like everywhere else. I usually avoid it unless I'm pointed to something of specific interest, and I don't find that I miss it.
Substack on the other hand does seem to have better stuff than most places.
The value is the publication such as https://medium.com/javarevisited/ which I usually use or https://medium.com/better-programming which is a bit more painful (for the submitter). But the benefit is that both have orders of magnitude more followers than I do. When an article goes up in a publication I get huge viewer numbers.
Monetization isn't available in my country so I never enabled it as an option. I'm not sure if I would turn it on to begin with as all my new content on medium isn't exclusive to the platform.
I dislike Medium (and other "plogging" environments) because you don't own anything that goes on it
Make the internet unique again.
That will be the end game.
Not sure how much they earn behind the wall.