Yeah, I think we are looking at it with some side eye. We have the friend link for a reason but not this reason. But right now it's on us to articulate what specific impact we see by you having it both ways of getting paid and giving people free reads.

I think directionally the concern is pretty obvious. You're getting paid on the reads from existing members and in return generating fewer or no new members. That is a form of freeloading on the other writers (who may also be looking at you with sideeye). If everyone did this, we'd eventually lose the ability to pay altogether.

You may think that free reads helps bring people into the membership tent. But we found very definitively that the move from a metered paywall (3 free reads) to a hard paywall did more to grow the membership that allows us to pay you and writers anything at all. Our original metered paywall was an idea copied from the NYTimes and we missed that they also had moved to a hard paywall years ago.