Yes. But it was more than "just another" blogging site. It was first and foremost an intelligent community of diverse writers and discussants. There were almost no pure readers here. Until Medium, such community and environment was unprecedented. You simply could not find it anywhere else. Then (when monetization started) people at Medium worked hard to crush the community by making communication (and content access) as hard and inconvenient as possible. And no one convinces me that it was not by design – divide and conquer. But it was astonishing (but also instructional) to see how people eagerly embraced it en masse when they were presented with a vision of a pittance they were offered. Well, they got what they wished for.