Thanks, and that's a great point about the limits of this strategy of preaching to the choir. There are plenty of unreflective masses on Medium. Indeed, the biggest publications are naturally aimed towards them. And I view the bulk of that more mainstream content (self-help, startup, how to make a fortune from writing, listicles, big tech boosterism, etc) as toxic garbage. I can't bring myself to write for those publications. On the contrary, I've gone through some of their criteria for evaluating articles and repudiated them.
This is how tribes form, of course, Birds of a feather flock together. The initiates are confined to the outer circle. As Jesus said, let those who have ears hear (the secret message of his parables). I'm not interested in demagoguing to the masses to try to earn as much money as I can off them, lying to them, oversimplifying issues, playing with their cognitive weaknesses with sophistry. Indeed, I explicitly castigate some big names who do so. And instead I philosophize. The bigger publications wouldn't touch my articles because they're too "negative" (i.e. subversive).
I haven't found a way of sugarcoating my message so it somehow appeals to the larger, necessarily unenlightened audience. So that's a big, outstanding mystery for me. How should those who strive to be intellectual elites relate to the masses? Is preaching to the choir enough? Should the message be dumbed down, as it was in the case of Gnosticism's descent into exoteric literalistic Christianity, for example? How much should the artist sell out before he can no longer live with himself?
I've written a lot on these questions, on the conflict between artistic and business interests, especially as it pertains to writers:
https://benjamincain8.medium.com/list/the-art-of-writing-324eb9c49a20
