Since yesterday (December 21st) the "Medium" Bit.Tube profile sends a "404" error message, with the following comment: "Feeling lost? You’re not alone." (see screenshot below)
The Medium blogging platform had been used for months by the Bit.Tube team as their main Weekly updates channel. Five days ago, for instance, the updates title was: "Roadmap first look, hard fork, hybrid PoS-PoW, iOS update and more" (it's currently readable on Reddit)
BatteryAziz, a Bit.Tube team member, commented: "Yes medium just suspended us without warning. We're setting up our own blog asap. The reason they gave was a comment I left on another medium article with the official account. It was marked as spam when it clearly wasn't. The funny thing is the suspension was basically a shadowban, we weren't notified at all. All of these silicon valley companies are way too brazen in their practices. See now why we need decentralized social media?" (source on the Bit.Tube subreddit).
The background reason for this sudden suspension is most probably the pace at which the Bit.Tube ecosystem and its derived apps is expanding: besides its AirTime-fed economic model (a protocol, similar to Musicoin's Universal Basic Income, where all users of the platform, the publishers and the viewers alike, contribute to create contents and get rewarded for dedicating time to it, for example just by watching the videos), in the last 2 months Bit.Tube launched a free of charge Chrome browser extension that allows: 1) to reward (by tipping) any contact / friend / content creator on massive platforms like Twitter, YouTube or Facebook;
and 2) to monetize the time we spend navigating on those GAFAMS websites or apps, while efficiently blocking any ad they try to bombard us with:
It has become a usual practice for blockchain-related projects to view "Medium" as THE public relations and users feedback no brainer "place to be". But some autonomous cryptoprojects (the ones Jackson Palmer would name "non institutionalized"), like Aragon, have recently abandoned their "Medium" account, because of the company's new publishing policy (see: "Aragon against censorship—Goodbye Medium, hello Ghost"")... Maybe the time has come for more cryptoprojects to sail away from that blog platform.
Apart from the GAFAMS (see the Google Play Bit.Tube app censorship), "Medium" too seems to consider Bit.Tube to be an inacceptably groundbreaking and profits-shrinking process.