But in practice, is Medium currently helping people build audiences in a significant way? My experience suggests no. It was easier for me to do that with a self-hosted site.
I'm not sure exactly why this is -- maybe it's that Medium's discovery algorithms take into account correlations between existing readers, so if you don't already have a bunch of readers you'll never get picked up. Maybe Medium is just super crowded, so the odds of you getting recommended over someone who's already popular are low.
All I know is that my readers are return viewers (which self hosting helps a lot with) and people coming from Hackernews, Reddit, Facebook, or curated link aggregators. I don't personally see any data that suggests Medium is driving any traffic to my content. And at this point, universally across the board, my self hosted blog performs better than my Medium blog.
I'm sure that varies from publisher to publisher, but I think it's simplistic to say that Medium by default drives traffic. I suspect that for small sites it's a lot more complicated.
> But in practice, is Medium currently helping people build audiences in a significant way?
I actually don't think Medium ever helped people build audiences in a significant way, with relatively few exceptions: Medium has always been structured to build an audience first for Medium and second for "publications" hosted on Medium. But it's never been particularly good at building audiences for individual authors.
While I'm aware this is anecdotal, there appears to be very little correlation between the number of followers one has and the number of views any given article gets: you can have several hundred followers and have some articles that get thousands of views (usually because they were included in someone else's publication or linked from somewhere else on the web), and others that get maybe a couple dozen views.
> I don't personally see any data that suggests Medium is driving any traffic to my content.
It is not. Readers that start on Medium by and large stay on Medium.
> maybe it's that Medium's discovery algorithms take into account correlations between existing readers,
Yes, Medium takes into account who you follow and what subjects you've liked, which is one reason Medium article collections like HackerNoon exist.
I feel Medium is for writers who don't take the time and effort necessary to self market their own content, which is not easy for many people. The platform is just like everything else in life. Are you willing to make concessions for its benefits? I don't see anything wrong with it as long as people are aware of the price of the Faustian deals they make in exchange for a little magic. The same applies to Alexa, Facebook, Waze, etc...
It does through emails and their homepage, which is one major reason people publish on Medium despite the downsides