[Herbstluft]

This might not be relevant to medium's downward spiral, but as a reader I find that medium is a marker for content of very low quality.

I follow a lot of personal blogs and over the years less than 3 medium posts (not even whole blogs) made it into my bookmarks.

When searching the web, medium content is often times just 1 or 2 steps above the worst SEO spam sites.

In short: I avoid medium.com links most of the time. It's basically the site for people that just want to write tons of clickbait low quality content to "build their brand".