Oh boy. Please, please stop using Medium for anything. I have lost count of how many potentially interesting or informative articles are published behind the Medium sign-in wall. At least for me, if you aren't publishing blog articles in public then what's the point of me trying to read them.
> "Create an account to read the full story."
They are also misleading the users with that message. I signed up, but now I got a message that I have to upgrade to a paid account...
If they had told me that from the start, I would not bother with creating an account at all. The message implies that a free account would be enough
This is why I always sign-up for something first time with fake data and a throw-away email address (I have a catch-all sub-domian, that is no longer off my main domain, for that). If it turns out the site is something I might care to return to I might then sign up with real details, or edit the initial account, if not then the email address given to them gets forwarded to /dev/null for when the inevitable spam starts arriving. I'm thinking of seeing if the wildcarding/catchall can be applied at the subdomain level, so I can fully null-route dead addresses in DNS and not even have connection attempts related to the spam.
I believe the blog poster has an option to toggle this. Maybe the default behaves like this?