I've fallen into the same trap with sites before. Discovering that your arcane knowledge is useful to others is fun and you enjoy helping random strangers with

I've fallen into the same trap with sites before. Discovering that your arcane knowledge is useful to others is fun and you enjoy helping random strangers with their questions. It seems like you are contributing to a public benefit and you are happy to continue giving away your time because it's helping people. But ultimately you are giving away your time so some 3rd party can make money off of your effort. But you're ok with this as it's still a pubic benefit right? But this company is in control of the "public benefit" and as they are doing this to make money, eventually you will find yourself running afoul of their rules because your goal is to help people, not to make the company money. Then you discover that your posts are not just getting deleted, they are getting moved to the a private part of the site for paying customers to see. Nope. So once you've found that you're coloring outside the lines too much or getting used in secret you start to author your own articles hosted on your own site. No reason to give away your IP, it's the best of both worlds as users trapped in the corporate portal get access to your insight and your IP stays your property. Then you discover that your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed. Nope. The only way to ensure you have the freedom to fully help people is to setup a quick site, CMS, forums, etc. And before you know it you're hosting a few sites for various reasons which get a small amount of traffic. But hey you're free of the man and that's not nothing. Time goes by and you have less and less time to help your small flock of users. Eventually your sites are taken over by spam bots and they all get de-platformed by google to reduce the spread of the new malware your sites are hosting. Some day you take the sites down, usually just as your trim down your neckbeard. Helping people is fun, but all things must happen in moderation. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hours helping an internet stranger once in a while, but you need to avoid making it your main free-time activity for this exact reason. If you're doing it through someone else's site then you are generating revenue for someone. I don't work for free, and neither should you. Most of us have a shit ton of other projects always on the back-burner, go work on one of those instead.