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Exactly. I run Better Programming, which is the second biggest programming publication on Medium after Towards Data Science. And it's definitely the case that authors are opting in to the deal that Medium offers: a usually small amount of money and a fairly large boost in readers.

The average article we publish does 10k views, which for most authors is way more than they'd get self-hosting and posting out to Twitter/FB.

I think also that Medium is still overly dominated by user generated content, i.e. what people here are calling low quality articles. You'd think of that content differently if it were better curated and better edited.

But all of Medium's subscriber revenue gets reinvested in their content. Most of that is author payments, but also they pay copy editors and curation editors. What they haven't done in programming yet is pay for any articles that have had a proper high quality edit. In programming that's a story editor, tech reviewers and a bug/errata updating process. But I suspect that will change because the subscription numbers are starting to be big enough that they can afford to invest in these things.

That is not correct. I've had people complain they couldn't read my articles on Medium and I never took part in the partner program.
> That is not correct

That's an official publication of the company behind medium. Maybe they had some bugs in the past or the people who complained or the author just made mistakes.

Try to access this article: https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-refer...

Can you access it or not?

There are separate walls like account walls, max x articles per day, requiring sign in that are in addition and uncontrollable from paywalls, IIRC.
For metered content, "non-members get a select number of free stories in their member preview, which replenishes on the first of each month." (see https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017581433-About...).

If you hit the preview limit, you get the message "Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from."

Non-metered (i.e. free) content is not behind the metered paywall. Also if the author posts a "friend link" the article is freely accessible, even if metered otherwise.

Do you have other sources?

I'll keep an eye out for the exact message. I tend to avoid Medium as much as possible - scrolling is incredibly slow, and I recently found out medium storing several hundred MB of garbage in my localstorage, which it adds to every time I scroll.