This really isn't that complicated. Medium is changing its TOS for one reason only, to try to improve the value of the product that makes it (and all the writers) money: the paying memberships. I find highly amusing the conceit inherent in the writers' worry that Medium is going to find ways to repackage their content without compensation when Medium is clearly having trouble getting paying eyeballs on the content in the first place.

Quite honestly, I go in spurts in terms of my interest in reading the non-poetry, non-professionally-written/edited content on Medium. I periodically give it a good try and then eventually give up (again) because there is a real problem with quality on this site. Some of it is to be expected with the model. The Yahoo! Contributor Network from back in the day had the similar goal of being a platform for user-generated content and ran into most of the same issues as Medium without ever really finding any good answers.

I think Medium should considerably tighten up the standards not just for curation of what it chooses to promote but also what it allows to go behind the paywall to begin with. Plagiarism is obviously a big NO, but is relatively easy to catch and I would guess a much simpler problem than the layers and layers of derivative crap Medium writers are churning out.

I'm not going to name names or call out any specific publications, but it really would behoove everyone trying to make even a modest amount of money from Medium to treat it less of a content farm. (I'm frankly surprised it's taken this long for FB to start flagging Medium links as spam.) Make no mistake about it, if the overall quality doesn't improve, Medium is going to go away.