Meta

What’s With the “Member-Only” Star?

Medium has gone and made another aesthetic change instead of fixing its real problems

I’ve been taking a break from Medium for a little while to focus on my doctoral thesis (nearly finished!), but when I logged on today for the first time in a while, I noticed immediately that there’d been an update. Stars! Stars everywhere!

Before, Medium used to indicate when someone was a paid member with a little green ‘halo’ around their profile picture. It was an unobtrusive way to show who was a paid Member and who wasn’t, but one of which I’d always been a bit weary. Is it fair to advertise who has subscribed to paid content and who hasn’t? As I wrote in my article, “A Letter to My Nonpaying Followers,”:

I personally don’t like that you can tell who has paid and who hasn’t. I’ve seen some paying users say that they openly discriminate against nonpaying users by not engaging with their content “on principle” (you don’t have to pay to post, or even to make money in the MPP); they think this platform is only about making money, and think that it should be quid pro quo when it comes to reading and engaging with others who are also monetized. I believe otherwise. I believe that this platform should be for everybody; I follow and am followed by nonpaying members, who I see as valuable members of this community.

I wrote this when it was only a thin green line marking the difference between paying and nonpaying readers. Now, it seems, Medium has gone and updated the interface with a bright yellow, cartoonish star emoji to show who is and isn’t a paid member.

So far, it seems only to be one’s own icon that has gotten this treatment, but Medium often rolls out new ‘features’ slowly across the site; it’s only a matter of time before this is the standard across the platform. And for what reason? To make it easier to discriminate against nonpaying readers?

Another part of the update is that the website has made it clearer (glaringly obviously, really) which stories are monetized. Before, a small black star next to the story marked if it was metered. Now, a yellow star with the words “Member-only” appear front-and-center, as if to say: nonpaying readers, stay AWAY!

It might be helpful for nonpaying members to know what stories are monetized; since they reach a paywall after three metered articles per month, many are probably scrupulous about which three paid articles they click on. I’m not opposed to more transparency when it comes to monetization. But did it have to be so… ugly?

I used to love the aesthetic of Medium. Most of their visual updates have been about streamlining the website, making it look clean and professional. This emoji business seems like a step in the wrong direction. It’s childish and doesn’t fit the website’s overall vibe. It screams ‘amateur startup’!

And that’s not to mention that labeling an article “Member-only” is misleading! It makes it seem as if nonpaid accounts and visitors cannot view that article, when nonpaying readers still have three free reads per month (unless that’s changed?). It’s not Members-only, it’s metered. There’s a difference. Paying Members get full access to these stories, but that doesn’t mean external viewers and nonpaying members have zero access, only limited access. The word ‘monetized’ or ‘metered’ would be more accurate.

But mostly, I hate the star. Why have they chosen to spend time, effort, and presumably money on this design shift when there are other things to worry about?

What about all of Medium’s other problems?

It’s really annoying that Medium has made this update when there are so many other problems with the site. There have been many recent glitches, some of them quite serious:

• broken notification system (notifications not showing up, disappearing, not showing tags)
• monetized articles losing money
• earnings failing to appear on the stats page
• metered articles becoming unmetered
• users losing all their followers or being unable to view their follower count
• claps not displaying correctly
• hyperlinks not auto-converting into thumbnails
• users being unable to comment or post articles
• bookmarks not registering, or unbookmarking
• app crashes
• ‘page not available’ and server crashes
• highlights not showing up, or not being linked with comments
• drafts being deleted, or not auto-saving

among many, many others, I’m sure. There are also a number of non-glitch issues the Medium as a platform. Users have been demanding support for these problems, to no avail:

• rampant plagiarism, not being taken seriously
• no DM system or way to contact other users, other than comments
• laughable reporting and blocking system (if a troll blocks you, you cannot block them back — or report their comments!)
• no system to verify users or report impersonators
• no way to sort posts (by date, by length, by most-clapped, by most-viewed)
• no offline mode, save-for-later
• no longer able to write or edit posts using the app — it’s only for reading (another unwanted update that nobody asked for)
• no reading stats — why not have a ‘minutes read’ or ‘articles read this month’ tracker to help readers understand their own user data?
• no way to search for stories recently read or go back to ones you’ve closed (the ‘recently viewed’ tab does not work this way)

…and so many more. Yet we get cartoon stars instead of any meaningful update on whether Medium plans to address any of these quality-of-life issues that Members have been asking about for years.

I’m pretty frustrated by how Medium keeps updating the look of the site — sometimes breaking it in the process — rather than addressing any of the real concerns of their users. There are so many useful features they could be adding, but instead, it seems like they’re obsessed with tweaking the UI over and over and making changes nobody asked for.

Do you like the new stars? ✨

What would you like to see Medium add or change (besides fixing glitches)?

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Never miss a story by subscribing to my Medium via email. Looking for more like this? Check out my personal nonfiction, nonfiction journalism and longform fiction. I do not monetize poetry or flash fiction. My novels are temporarily out of print; find out why in my article, “The Dreamspinner Press Controversy.” You can also find me on Twitter or like my public Facebook page.