Because medium was a blogging platform just like all of the others that didnt add much over what writers on the platform wrote and relied on link aggregators to drive traffic.<p>Surprise surprise subscriptions added to much friction and people stopped linking so the conversation moved elsewhere.
Medium started off as a no-BS blog platform with a snappy reader experience and ended as the total opposite of that. Many digital products face the same fate once they're forced to monetize.
There used to be some good content on Medium because it had a fantastic editing/publishing experience and discoverability was good.<p>> Medium, a publishing platform that sought to split the difference between blogs and tweets: medium-length posts, [...]<p>For me, I think it failed because we end up with shallow posts that split the difference between a tweet and a blog. Monetization/paywalls may have accelerated it.<p>It's the same as anything else, once you remove all the barriers to entry most of the content is trash. The value of any content platform is being able to surface quality relevant content. Medium doesn't have any mechanisms for this so isn't better than anything else.
Medium’s failure was rather simple. Medium put paywalls in front of blogs. Blogs were supposed to be an open medium. I don’t think anybody really wanted that.