I'm not surprised and as I say in the article "A heads-up would have been nice, but still, that's their prerogative."
I do understand why they would want to move in the direction they are, but I also think authors in particular should be aware of the trends and make choices that will benefit them, rather than Medium, in the long run.
What's a bit sneaky here is that they have been selling authors on the fact that they own the content, and the fact that you can move it elsewhere later (including updating canonical links). It's a bit like a SaaS offering an export function, but after you put a lot of your data there they quietly remove it. For bloggers, you can't claim to give them proper data portability without a way of updating the canonical links.
I do understand why they would want to move in the direction they are, but I also think authors in particular should be aware of the trends and make choices that will benefit them, rather than Medium, in the long run.
What's a bit sneaky here is that they have been selling authors on the fact that they own the content, and the fact that you can move it elsewhere later (including updating canonical links). It's a bit like a SaaS offering an export function, but after you put a lot of your data there they quietly remove it. For bloggers, you can't claim to give them proper data portability without a way of updating the canonical links.