I joined Dev.to because I was disappointed with Medium's direction (then and now) and felt there should be a place where developers could share information in a minimal fashion (while being pleasant to read) but still allowed easy social promotion. Stack Overflow's hijacking of community content for their own needs showed that wasn't a platform to be trusted either.
Usually I'm always signed into Dev.to and therefore I hadn't realised that if you read a piece there you get a massive half-page pop-up asking you to join.
That's not really the kind of reading experience I want people to have when they are arriving from search looking for help.
These kind of experiences are the kind of things that are driving me to try and find an alternative blogging platform that might lack some of the social promotion but hopefully will be a better experience for the readers.