I think what it comes down to is that people are scared that Medium is going to use their license to steal all your content. Their license is weird: It says it allows them to make derivative works with your content, but at the same time it says it allows you to retain ownership of your content. What does that mean? Nobody knows.

I think if Medium just clarified that one line in their license it would make everyone's fears go away.

It means the same thing that this license means everywhere else: Medium can do whatever they want with your submission, and so can you.

It is standard CYA terms to keep them from getting sued by their users whenever they decide to change the site in such a way that displays your content in a different manner than what you expected.

Then they should say that's what it's for. I think that would be simple enough.

Every service you've ever signed up for that accepts user-generated/submitted content has a clause functionally identical to this.

Of course, every time someone reads one of those clauses they think it implies all sorts of evil, because reading comprehension is not a strong suit of the internet.

To put it other way round, maybe comprehensive writing is not a strong suite of the Internet.

They are just words. Surely anything Medium does with them is going to promote the author also?

I don't see Medium as an all or nothing platform.

No-one is forcing anyone to post ALL of a person's writing there.

Personally I see Medium as an extension of my publishing options, so I've retained my own blog whilst occasionally posting selected articles on Medium.

This seems to chime better with the whole concept of collections or buckets of content on Medium.

It is subject first rather than author first.

Which perhaps explains why so many of the "essential" parts from other services are missing.