My theory is that the aggressive business practices and dark patterns are a sign of desperation in the face of a failing business model. Nobody wants the paywall, so authors don't put posts behind the paywall (most of them don't even blog to make money, they do it for publicity or for fun). You might sympathize with Medium here: they're hosting all this content for free and nobody wants to give them the money to pay their hosting costs!
But here's the thing: those hosting costs only become significant when they are centralized on a platform like Medium. If I want to go start my own blog site, I can set it up without any coding and host it for single-digit dollars a month. If most authors are blogging simply because they want to, they won't have a problem with paying that nominal fee, and suddenly huge server costs are spread out to the point that they become trivial. Medium is trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. That's why it's sinking.
Reasonable in theory, but in practice subscribers have gone up and that's evident in the payout to authors. Also, in the vacuum of HN & FCC leaving Medium, I had no problem launching a programming pub focused on the subscriber program, finding authors (212 in the first 40 days), and readers (now hitting 25k views/day).
What's sort of lost in all of this discussion is the point of the subscriber program. The point is to higher quality articles to people who care about quality. A programmer's hourly rate is well above three figures, why would you waste your time reading low quality articles? Because sometimes they're the best available. But it doesn't have to be that way.
But here's the thing: those hosting costs only become significant when they are centralized on a platform like Medium. If I want to go start my own blog site, I can set it up without any coding and host it for single-digit dollars a month. If most authors are blogging simply because they want to, they won't have a problem with paying that nominal fee, and suddenly huge server costs are spread out to the point that they become trivial. Medium is trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. That's why it's sinking.