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When someone says they don't do something for the money, what they mean is that some of the value of doing the work is that you enjoy the work. You might be able to get $15/hour doing something you hate, but doing something you love for $5/hour a few hours a week is worth the $10/hour difference. That doesn't inherently mean it's worth a $15/hour difference.

And even if it is, that doesn't mean you're happy about losing the $5/hour.

"None of us wrote for StR for the money" is a colloquialism. It doesn't mean that they'd work for free, or for under some threshold where the money they get isn't financially responsible for them given the time they put into it.

I have to imagine that Vox Media is not going to allow people to write for them for free for a number of reasons, and the community the website developed is probably a main reason why they wrote there.