I published my first article on Medium over the weekend (https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/a27e01e84fac). It got it's first bump from HN, but 17k+ reads following was from Medium's readership. It also got featured on LifeHacker. I don't think they would have found it on my own blog.
Honestly, I didn't see any compelling reasons in that article not to use Medium. My post got it's initial bump from Hacker News, but then everything following has been due to Medium already having a built in readership. If I posted this to my own blog, sure HN would have driven the same amount of traffic. But I don't have a readership like Medium. There's something to be said about Medium's writing tools as well. I found myself enjoying writing again using their system. It's very clean and focused. Maybe I wouldn't have produced as good of an article without it.
This wasn't meant to advocate profiting from selling the stuff you no longer use. An earlier draft even pointed out this would only be possible the first time you sell all the extra crap you own.
I think people are getting hung up on me saying you should do this too. I assumed readers would intelligently apply the article to their own situation. I recognize everyone's situation is different.
The point here was that I didn't re-buy everything, only the essentials I really needed or missed. I ended up having a lot less in the end, and only things I would use.