Before Medium, I was on an internet forum called "Writerbeat," which went defunct. The moderator/owner could not figure out to monetize.

We writers could only publish once every 72 hours. Many articles had 20 or more thoughtful comments.

Players were from all sorts of political stripes. We even had a couple white supremacists.

In the end, I belonged to group of about 10 contributors. We joined forces on LinkedIn later and continued the discussion. For some reason, we went to Discord--and I decided to drop out.