The big problem (well, one big problem, not the only one) with Medium is that it's actually really terrible for discovery.
If you want your posts to be seen, the main thing to do is to try to get them linked in as many places as possible. If you use Twitter, tweet the links. If you use Reddit, post the links in an appropriate Subreddit. (Those can drive a surprising amount of traffic.) If you're in niche communities that have their own forums, Slack channels, Discord servers, Telegram channels, etc., etc., and your article is on-topic, link it there. You need to do this all in a way that isn't spammy or obnoxious, for obvious reasons: you're saying "I think this link will be interesting to the audience here," but if you're really saying "OMG I need the hits click on me click on me click on me," people will pick up on it.
And then... hope. The chances are the post still isn't going to go anywhere in particular, but getting the link seen and shared by others is what will eventually drive an audience to it.
The more articles you write, the more likely you are to get something once in a while which catches on. Writing at least semi-regularly also helps. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but you have to actually have something interesting to say. "Join a New Developer on Their Journey With The Same Technologies The Last 58,213 Developers Who Wrote 'My Developer Journey' Blogs" will probably not cut it.
None of these things are specific to Medium, obviously, and frankly I don't think posting on Medium is a really great choice. If you're looking for a free blog, start it at WordPress.com, and maybe pony up the $15 a year to connect it to a custom domain. (I blogged at Tumblr for years, which can actually be set up to be a terrific blogging platform if you choose the right theme, but I'm not sure about its long-term viability at this point.)
This is a genuine question - i only know Medium from the reader's side, where it is something that makes me about 20% less likely to read your writing!
This is a far less pleasant and high-variance process than you make it out to be.
- Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience" question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging, etc to get an audience.
- Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if it's non-monetized OC (been there)
- Hacker News is a single-stream audience, and while occasionally you'll get onto the front page, more often content dies with a few dozen views. And it's not an especially differentiated audience.
For someone whose job is content creation, this might be realistic, but you're asking experts in a field -- whose primary job is research, and being an expert, not social media outreach -- to spend a huge portion of their time on audience generation and self-promotion. That's not realistic.
I hate Medium, for a ton of reasons, but it succeeds at making it easy for one-off or two-off writers to get a large audience without investing years of work on it. Sure, the audience isn't WORTH a lot to them (they can't monetize it, and it could get pulled from under them at the drop of a hat), but if the goal is to spread a message or get a post read, sorry, it's still a very viable outlet for doing that.
Sharing on those sites is pretty hit or miss. I posted a blog post I wrote here once, went pretty much ignored. Someone else posted it (big company engineering blog) same link and it was on the front page for awhile with some interesting discussion. I almost missed all of it too.
