Thanks for this potted history. I joined in October 2018, though I was reading the allowed allotment of freebies for a while before that. What this illustrates, as I see it, is that Medium's ideal of being all about writers and readers - what drew me originally - cannot be realized on a commercial platform that has to make a profit for its shareholders and be "economically viable" in that soul-killing, ordinary way. The most obvious evidence of that for me is that both writers and readers have always been subject to the whims and caprices of the platform management that you outline here.