A thing I’ve been wondering lately is what is the root cause fault with the complaining about Medium’s paywall popups?

Certainly, Medium seems clear that they think paying directly for content results in better content. That’s who they are now.

If I were to tweet a link to an O’Reilly book, everyone following that link would expect to hit a paywall before being able to read it. Same if I tweeted about a show I’m watching on Netflix.

Is it that Google and the social networks don’t know how to differentiate metered content like Medium or the NYTimes? They present it alongside any other article as if you’ll definitely be able to read it. (Technically, Medium content is always unmetered if you follow a Twitter link)

To me, this is root of the problem.