I’m actually paying $5 a month to use this site, but that’s because it’s a platform for writers where I can get paid for what I write, and I get a huge return off it. I wouldn’t pay to use Twitter or Facebook or certainly not GAB. I wouldn’t pay up front to be on Patreon, either, which takes a percentage off the back end. And Medium didn’t start implementing paywalls and membership fees until about three or four years after it had been in business, when it had a critical mass of users. It certainly didn’t start doing it while it was in beta.