I guess the obvious question would be, “Is Medium a scam?”.

I write on Medium more for the entertainment/education factor. I pay to get the level of decency in the comments that the paywall provides. My “schtick" is “what are people for?”, and “net future usefulness", which is the anti-hustle (asking what we are doing for our places).

Scammers are an emergent phenomenon of extraction economics. If everyone is conditioned to take more than they give from their own place or future self, it’s easy to convince them to take just a little more to wager on a scam: until the system/ego/food/authority fails. This is the rise and fall of civilization in a nutshell.