If you want people to pay you for writing, you end up doing something. Right now "something" seems to consist of walling it off, begging for donations, or running ads. Everybody would love a better option.

If all you want is to be read, you have more options. But it's still hard for people to find you, since everyone else has the exact same options. Turns out lots of people will write for free.

Yes, I agree. The only trouble is where all the people are inside this garden…. (that -fortunately- is not the case of Medium but other socials are very centralized in one name: Meta). For that every little effort to open the fences of some gardens is precious. Translated: go away from any sort of centralized web.