Wow, this is really interesting food for thought.

I’ve recently had a few referred members join. I hear Jenny Lee’s point. I guess in my defence most of my referees come through my sharing specific pieces on other platforms and so perhaps another way of looking at it is that without seeing my article some people maybe would never have joined medium in the first place, so some pieces shared externally bring in new reads, comments etc for everyone else which is a bonus after I’m doing the advertising/marketing of sharing an article outside of medium.

Just my musings. No right or wrong.