Care to elaborate? Are you also against the notion of paying to enter a concert or sporting event? If no, could you expand on what you believe the difference between these two things to be?

ad-surveillance supported free websites is ok, but paid membership access is late stage capitalism?

Paywalls are great at stopping spammers. And membership for groups is hardly an internet only thing.

Haven't tried Hyper, but the nft gated discords I use are much nicer places to hang out and chat and make things together. In the past year ive gone from using discord maybe once a month to it being my main internet social-space. Even better is that most of the memberships feed back into the group accounts.

I'm curious why you have such a strong reaction against this though, I much prefer it to adverts.