Not arguing, but Medium is more than the votes & articles. It's the totality of the experience (from reading/metrics to emails & recommendations to paywalls & payments). I'd hardly call this medium - its a distributed blogging platform.
I guess they might be thinking of the syndication. Medium allows anyone to post, and suggests articles from different authors. This is similar. It enables blogs (if they use activity pub) to be syndicated throughout the blogosphere.
