Did Medium have a way to pay authors? Maybe it would have been easy to add but saying "A could have been B if only" I think misses the picture. Yahoo could have been Google if only they'd chosen a different algo. Flickr could have been Instagram if only they'd made a mobile app with filters. Etc...
I think it's precisely because substack launched with a way to let readers sponser the authors directly they liked that it took off. Medium had a partner program but that's not the same.
Did Medium have a way to pay authors? Maybe it would have been easy to add but saying "A could have been B if only" I think misses the picture. Yahoo could have been Google if only they'd chosen a different algo. Flickr could have been Instagram if only they'd made a mobile app with filters. Etc...
I think it's precisely because substack launched with a way to let readers sponser the authors directly they liked that it took off. Medium had a partner program but that's not the same.