I like your advice to abandon skim-enabling formatting so much it scares me! It's exactly the opposite of every other piece of "writing for Medium" advice I've read -- and I've read a LOT of it. Do I dare to follow it? It makes SO much sense!
It makes me wonder what other advice that goes unquestioned is advice I can ignore. For me, the biggest headache in publishing articles on Medium is images. If I want to write a more detailed response to an article or to make a specific abstract point, I have no idea what sort of image to use. I also find it a huge time suck.
Frankly it sucks that I need to bother with pics at all. I read articles and don't pay any attention to the images. If the title catches my interest, I'll read the entire article. White space is great but I could care less about the images.
I created my own publication for my short pieces where I dispense with the image and the subtitle.
https://medium.com/kit-carmelites-gotta-minute
This has given me a sense of freedom in my creativity. Knowing I'd have to find an image for everything I put on Medium was giving me a case of writer's block. I'm not the first one to do this. I got the idea from Todd Brison.
