There is a great story about how they crafted the link underlines on Medium.
This is a story on how a quick evening project to fix the appearance of underlined Medium links turned into a month-long endeavour.
I kinda wish they’d have the same experience in creating a clean and useful structure for the URLs on Medium. A post URL of https://medium.com/p/7c03a9274f9 leaves me with no clue about what is there or how it relates to anything else on the site. Author URLs like https://medium.com/@mwichary with that @ are awkward in the same way that https://plus.google.com/+ThomAllen is with the + in the middle.
Instead the URLs on Medium are simple, in that they usually have very few components, but they aren’t what I’d consider clean and useful.