Poor execution and the lack of a moat have caused medium to get pushed in a mode where the measures they put in place to generate revenue ended up throwing away the baby with the bath water in terms of alienating both writers and readers from their platform. Which is of course disastrous for any content platform.

Better execution might have prevented some of that but not all of it because without revenue, it was not a sustainable company. So, they had to do something given the level of investment and the mediocre revenue. Better execution would have not done anything to prevent competitors from stepping up. That was always going to happen.

But fundamentally, they are just a blogging platform. There are many blogging platforms out there and it's not rocket science to create some more. Blogging platforms are a commodity. It doesn't matter that much if theirs is nice to use, beautifully designed and comes with a great UX. And I would actually dispute it is that good to begin with. Either way, it's still a commodity. Easy to imitate, clone, copy, whatever. The value of that was always relatively low. And I don't think medium ever had a good plan for addressing that.