Why would anyone want to pay to put an article on medium? They had better offer quite an impressive array of discovery features if I'm paying them to use a service that gives me less control over my own content than I would otherwise have.
The problem isn't that people are posting low quality, low effort content on medium. That's a problem that micropayments would solve. The problem is that it has become popular on medium to post certain types of content that other medium users find distasteful.
There's not much a site like medium can do to resolve a conflict of values in its userbase without restructuring the experience to enable the community to fragment, probably at the expense of some nice thing or another.
The problem isn't that people are posting low quality, low effort content on medium. That's a problem that micropayments would solve. The problem is that it has become popular on medium to post certain types of content that other medium users find distasteful.
There's not much a site like medium can do to resolve a conflict of values in its userbase without restructuring the experience to enable the community to fragment, probably at the expense of some nice thing or another.