Could you articulate a little more of why you feel that the views set you back in the long run? One simple and trivial reason why I believe it's useful is that it gives any non-member an ability to read the piece if they do decide to click. Otherwise, many non-members will open it, read a paragraph, close it when they get paywalled, and actually hurt your read ratio, thereby hurting its overall potential to reach a wide audience. I don't have hard data on that, but anecdotally and logically I'm convinced that's true.

It's true we can at least share onto other social media platforms, but they can't be reshared and reshared. The viral potential is all but gone with only the friend link. I think Substack's model here is much wiser for longterm growth.

Curious to hear your thoughts on the other! Another element to the issue that I don't really explore very much in either article is SEO and domain authority (how easily our articles are found through google.) It's an older article now, but I talk about that component of the issue, too, in a piece called "The End to Free Non-Member Reads on Medium." So this is actually my third piece on the subject. It's certainly one I feel pretty strongly about.

Thanks for reading and for the comment, Catherine!