For me, primarily a reader / commenter, I often wonder what Medium will end up as - and whether it's worth sticking around. As it is now, having found the authors and commenters I'm interested in, it's a lot like an old time company-internal forum at, say, Lotus Development, or BBN (informative, plus comment threads written by very bright people; angles I'd not thought of on my own). These could be about an internal product, a RFC, acoustic waveform interference, or something 'out there'.

My doubts around Medium center on changes in the UI progressively making it more difficult to actually make a comment. No idea if that's intentional (I have ‘war’ stories about unintentional results in UI design - even though that wasn't my particular area).

Agreed that the quality is quite variable between authors as is publication QC. I've leaned to embrace the "mute this author/publication" checkbox - but what seems to be really needed are publications centered on curating the rest of Medium - each for a particular interest. no idea if that fits with what Medium is doing with publications

That said, Gunnar, you have been doing a great job of curating some parts of the world I've gotten interested in, which otherwise is like trying to take a drink out of a firehose... actually that's a poor metaphor, it's more like trying to understand everything moving in a river. In any case, thanks for doing this, and I'm quite pleased that you are managing to get some kind of financial recompense for what you're doing.