Good questions. I'll try to give good answers.
> Is the company still on track to reach profitability in the first half of 2024? (Seeing this article on TechCrunch prompted me to ask.)
Yes. Although that is a big milestone, I expect it will be a low drama path to get there. I said the same thing in an interview this week:
> Has the introduction of ‘Friend of Medium’ helped significantly?
If you mean helped get to profitability, no. That money goes to writers.
> Will there ever be a free tier that is supported by advertising?
IMO, we do already have a free tier supported by advertising. Most writers aren't in the partner program and most stories aren't behind the paywall. The read more links on those stories are functionally house ads for the Medium membership. The thing I wonder is whether we will have a paid author tier that doesn't have those. I would imagine, yes.
> 2. Are there any practices on Medium that you don’t approve of?
I'm not in the business of giving or withholding approval. However there are things that I think are rude, misguided, and/or a waste of time.
Done authentically, writing is an inherently healthy activity. The writer comes to understand their own mind. Their ideas get sharper and they discover ideas and knowledge that they didn't even know they had.
Sharing that sort of authentic writing is an act of generosity where your ideas and information and wisdom then get passed on to the reader. I have tremendous appreciation for the wisdom of every person's life story down to the most mundane details and even more appreciation for the people who share those details.
What I would say to people engaging in the other type of writing (clickbait, growth hacks, and churning out content) is that they are wasting their own time, on top of being rude. The term programmers use is local maxima. They are grinding their way up the tiniest of tiny hills when there is a giant mountain right next door. For people who want to make money through writing, the creator economy seems to have obscured that there is a much more lucrative expert economy right next to it. Writing is a way to leapfrog people with similar skills.
> Should there be an upper limit for how many people are tagged in one story?
Nobody should be tagged in a story for the purpose of generating an unwanted notification in the hopes that they will overlook the transgression and read your story, or worse, generate revenue for the author. At minimum, any author doing this should be honest with themselves that this is rude both to the person being tagged and to the other authors they are siphoning money from. It is a form of spam and getting away with it isn't the same as it being moral.
> What are your thoughts on read-for-read?
There is such a thing as authors exchanging reads in order to exchange feedback. This is a healthy behavior.
What I think you are referring to is a growth hack and is a waste of time.
> Are there any improvements in the pipeline? Here are my suggestions.
We made some date promises over the summer that we didn't hit and now we aren't making promises anymore. Things will launch when they launch.
