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You all remember Immanuel Kant, right? He’s the one who asked, in convoluted German of course, “What if everybody did that?”
As far as I know, the fees Medium Partner Program members pay fund the payments Medium Partner Program authors get. So, when an author writes a pay-walled article, and then puts the friend link or an external link (to Substack, say) in the first line, so that people can read the article without paying into the Medium.com pool, the poor schmucks who do pay to belong start to wonder what they’re paying for. Worse, the authors who don’t let non-members read their paid articles wonder why they should be playing by the rules. If everybody put a free link in their paid articles, no one would have to join Medium.com. How, then, would any Medium.com author get any money from the Partner Program?
I’m fine with people publishing articles that are not pay-walled. If you don’t expect to get paid out of Medium members’ membership fees, then it’s fine if you don’t limit your audience to Medium members. But if you put your article behind the pay-wall, don’t give freeloaders a ladder to scale it. If you want to share the pool, guard the pool. Otherwise, the pool will fail like an over-fished ocean or an over-grazed pasture.