You're certainly right that it isn't my company. But Medium does frame themselves as constantly changing and very receptive to the input of its users. I've seen far more scathing and critical said of Medium without the users facing any sort of repercussions. It's the hateful content that they understandably seem to take the most seriously. If Tony thought this behavior violated the MPP, I really believe he would have told me that in a straightforward manner as I've actually seen him do with others within the comment sections of other pieces.

That price of coffee for a month doesn't seem like much, but it still skips over the fact that I myself would not have joined if reading that first article had required me to fork that over. Just this week, I tried to read an article on a new platform, got paywalled after a few sentences, and made a mental note to myself not to return. There was nothing within those first few sentences they showed me to convince me that it was worth my money. My experience is that paywalled articles offer maybe 10-20% of an article tops, and I would rarely call he beginnings of my articles so intriguing to invite in new users off of that alone.

Also, as me and many others do on Substack now, I don't make all of my articles are free. I keep quite a few of mine behind a paywall still.

If Medium has done its market research about what the impact of 1 free reads over 3 might be for example, I don't know why they wouldn't be a little more open about that when asked. I think it's very possible that they aren't fully aware of what would happen if this middle of the road approach were introduced instead of the 3 or 0 free reads routes we've seen this past year.