[ken]

Medium was originally a great experience for the reader. No interstitials, no ads, no unrelated photos, no pleading to "follow" or "become a member". Just your text, nicely formatted.

Compare a simple article, across the years:

2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20141201191740/https://medium.co...

2019: https://medium.com/@fields/now-its-about-the-things-that-you...

Once they started achieving critical mass, like every other free-to-use webpage, they loaded it full of crap.

[mycall]

Maybe that was a bad example or my ad-blockers are working really well, but the 2019 edition only has ads at the bottom for me which is easily ignorable.