Why should you, I, or anyone else care when that part of the audience is solely concerned with how to make the experience bearable for free at the expense of making it genuinely worthwhile? Its not a coherent position.
Medium is trying to be a two-sided marketplace. In any such marketplace, the producers want the audience to be as big as possible, and the consumers want the inventory to be as big as possible. Neither cares about Medium making a profit, except to the extent it incidentally furthers their own goals.
To succeed, either they monetize the transaction as a middleman (e.g. ads when transactions don't involve the exchange of money), or they figure out how to establish a direct financial relationship with the producers and/or consumers (like Costco's annual fee).
Medium has chosen a pathological route of using the two-sided marketplace principally to advertise a fee for their own product. (Yes, "principally" is fair. I believe their conversion rate is low, so the vast majority of impressions represent potential members of the two-sided marketplace that they're OK turning away, even though that frustrates both the producers who wanted the audience to grow, and the consumers who wanted to read the article.)
The fact that they can't figure out a better way to make money than to turn away customers is not my problem. There are plenty of other places for me to read or publish content that have figured out how to be sustainable operations.
My personal viewpoint is that Medium is in a death spiral. If their paywall is abrasive, which I think it is, then I won't join, because I would question which content publishers would be OK being behind an abrasive paywall. Medium's real offer to me -- that they're where to find content from publishers I like -- has failed. That was their one and only job from my perspective. They failed.
