Right - medium has it's own set of problems, which have nothing to do with curation or readership. They failed to find a viable business model to keep paying writers. Also, not all writers on medium are paid, you can go signup and start writing right now if you wanted. They attract non-paid bloggers through an extremely polished and easy to use author experience, and then authors go out and promote themselves on other platforms.

Luckily it'll look a lot more like reddit (I hope) once we get communities here sometime this year.