My last free article?

An experiment in monetization

I’ve always liked the idea or making my articles available for everybody for free, and I will always do my best to make sure that nobody loses access to them for lack of money. I started blogging so many years ago because I thought there were too many harmful ideas floating around in the meme pool and I had to do something about it. When I write an article, no matter the subject, I do it because I genuinely feel that the subject is important and there is too much confusion about it, too many conflicting narratives that cannot reconciled. Every article I write, even when it isn’t explicitly about ethics, I write with the ultimate goal of making the world a slightly better place, so naturally I want to make it accessible for everyone.

That said, it’s hard to blog when you have a full-time job, and it’s hard to get a well-paid job as a philosophy writer when all your professional experience is as a software developer and your only relevant credential is a master’s in Analytic Philosophy degree completed after an unrelated bachelor’s in Computer Engineering. If I want to dedicate more time and energy into writing, my only choice is to try to monetize my writing. And since Medium makes this so easy, I decided to give it a shot. This experiment might very well be temporary, since I am very aware that instead of making money I might simply lose the very few readers I have. But in order to find out I have to try.

From now on, if you want to read my full articles, you have the following options:

1. Create a free Medium account and be careful not to cross the 3 article limit. I rarely write more than 3 articles per month, or even more than 1 really, so if you don’t really want to read any articles by other authors on Medium, this should be fine.
2. If you run out of free articles, however, you have two options:

• a) Get a paid membership for $5/month or $50/year, which will give you access to my articles and also any other article by any Medium author.
• b) Support me on Patreon, where you can give me $2 for every article I write, with the option of setting a monthly limit to make sure you won’t be broke if I go crazy and start writing an article per day. Even if you set a limit of one article per month, you still can access all my articles, which means this is a cheaper solution if all you want is to read my articles and you don’t care about other Medium authors.

Of course, besides these official options there is always the possibility of using paywall bypassers, and I won’t judge you if you do that because I have used them myself and I have downloaded a ton of piracy in my life, so I don’t want to be a hypocrite. But by being open and putting everything on the table like this I hope that at least some of you will be guilt-tripped enough into supporting me 😌

Thanks.