Who’s Paying For Medium?
I wasn’t, and here’s how you find out
Between Sep 3 and Sep 8, I had no Medium subscription (backstory at the bottom). From this, I learned there’s a clear way that others can determine whether you have an active subscription or not.
It all comes down to a green halo.
This was my account before a membership. It shows a small reminder to resume membership at the top, and no green halo around my profile icon. This lack of green halo shows up across comments, notifications.
An active Medium subscription looks like this, with two green lines outlining the author’s icon. You can see these green halos throughout your notifications to see if those who are interacting with you have active memberships.
Just a small tidbit I learned from my extreme procrastination. Full story deets below. 👀
Bonus: the dumb backstory of the subscription lapse
I had joined Medium on a free-trial basis, opting for the $5/month subscription at first. I had no idea if this platform would be worth the money, and as a graduate student, the budget is tight.
After three months of both reading and writing on this platform, I decided it was time to make the commitment. I love the platform and I much prefer reading poetry and pieces by writers than spending my entire life on Twitter reading inflammatory tweets. (I still do check Twitter, but I now spend less than half an hour, compared to the hours that I used to spend on that platform.)
Here’s the absolute dumb part. I actually made this decision somewhere in late July, unsubscribed from the monthly subscription, hoping to be able to immediately re-subscribe to the yearly subscription ($50USD/year). It actually wouldn’t let me, as long as the July monthly subscription was still active. Whenever I tried re-subscribing, it would re-attach me to the same monthly plan.
Now at this point, I should have just Googled how to do this. I did not. I just waited until August rolled around and I paid for another monthly subscription. I knew that as long as I was subscribed to the recurring payments, I would forever be on the monthly plan. So I cancelled my August subscription, which ended on Sep 3, thinking that I would resubscribe right away.
As you can see, five whole days elapsed between my cancelled subscription and my re-subscription. It wasn’t even because I forgot. It was entirely procrastination over-representing how much time hitting the subscription button would be and putting it off for the longest time possible. Yet I would check in on my notifications, thinking they would take only a few seconds, only to be reminded that I can’t see the beautiful pieces that other writers are creating. I was creating unnecessary frustration for myself by over-estimating how long and how many steps it would be to figure out the monthly subscription thing.
In reality, it took a total of 2 minutes. Once the subscription lapsed, the platform treated me like a new reader rather than a returning reader, and it showed me the menu to choose a monthly or yearly subscription.
For five whole days, I feared being found out that I was a non-subscribing writer who was still publishing and earning off other’s memberships while not contributing a penny. It was also a pang of rising guilt that could have been solved by a 2-minute task.
I guess the big lesson I took from this is to really learn from these time misestimates so I can stop letting guilt and frustration rise for no real reason.
What are you putting off that you think will take about 9 years but realistically may take less than half an hour?
This is my call for you to put on some dance music and get those tiny tasks done!
Lucy (The Egg Girl) is striving to learn about the little quirks about herself that prevent her from doing the things that align with her values — y’know, like procrastination and self-doubt. She writes about how she overcomes her procrastination humps, her gratitude to her feet, and her thoughts about blooming in adversity. She thinks you should read Kaitlyn Greenidge’s article: “I wasn’t taught certain things about my ancestors”.