I think there's good reason to be annoyed at Medium. You know that these services need paying for - and you didn't need hundreds of millions of VC money to figure it out. So why did Medium make a load of promises they couldn't keep?
It's also worth noting that the continual introduction of companies like Medium who grab market share in the blogging space and then piss everyone off acts as a constant wrecking agent against sustainable alternatives. We constantly see this wrangling of bloggers and shitty nagware UIs because we constantly see people trying to break into this space and monetize it. Medium is making the world a worse place. They ran a loss leader to bring people on board and now they're trying to rent-seek. This is bad behaviour and people seem to just give it a pass.
It's also worth noting that the continual introduction of companies like Medium who grab market share in the blogging space and then piss everyone off acts as a constant wrecking agent against sustainable alternatives. We constantly see this wrangling of bloggers and shitty nagware UIs because we constantly see people trying to break into this space and monetize it. Medium is making the world a worse place. They ran a loss leader to bring people on board and now they're trying to rent-seek. This is bad behaviour and people seem to just give it a pass.