In interest of this maybe not ending somewhere totally hostile, I'm gonna explain myself a little more here, because I don't really get the impression it's something you've thought all that much about. When information is left behind a paywall, it leads to a stupefaction of society. It's a pretty common sentiment, and certainly one I've felt as a reader, that it's frustrating when I only want to read and article on a platform I'm unsure about joining only to get paywalled. When I publish an article about the war in Gaza, I want to leave open the possibility of a Palestinian reading it. When I write an article about the reasons to vote or the dangers of voting in a tyrant, I certainly don't want to restrict that message to only my personal friends. I want voters periods to be able to read my work, even those I disagree with. But that doesn't mean I don't deserve to be paid.
Precisely the reason I decided Medium might be a good home for me was because of a paywalled article I was able to read through the 3 free read policy. Which Medium discontinued not all that long ago. I wrote an entire article about the decision if it's something you're at all open to reading. It seemed to be a very common sentiment among readers that they were frustrated with Medium for the decision, and that it was a bit underhanded of them to do it without even an announcement until a month or two later.
To address that shooting in the foot point, it just plainly couldn't be further from the truth. I don't want to get into the specifics of my finances, but I'll just say that I'm making quadruple what I ever did as a cashier, and ten times what I made as a journalist who wrote whatever shitty piece I was assigned and accepted whatever atrocious edits were made to them. I've been Boosted ten times this past month alone and staff picked (not to mention, on an article which I included the free member link at the top for.) If Medium didn't want people doing this, they wouldn't leave open the option, let alone promote the articles that do it to platform full of people.
