Why Being a Friend of Medium is Not Like Other Premium Memberships

And it’s the first time I can remember seeing a membership like this

A slightly dodgy creation using Canva Magic Studio.

I won’t lie that when I saw the invitation to become a Friend of Medium by joining Medium’s newest, and more expensive, level of membership, I sighed.

Here we go again, I thought.

I remembered the announcement on X — once known as Twitter —a while back, that we would no longer get to see the tweets of those whom we followed prioritised in our feed unless we paid a baksheesh to have the privilege of curating what we see. Oh, and the little blue checkmark that had once signified something more significant than that we were paying clients. It was a real moment of wearing your dollars with pride.

X is far from the only place on the internet that creates different tiers of memberships and adds or removes privileges with such creations. It’s everywhere. And when, like me, you’ve been trying to scrape a living online for a while, you get very used to seeing it.

So when Medium’s new membership level appeared as an optional upgrade, I naturally assumed it was going the down the same route. Perhaps Medium was going to introduce advertisements on the free and cheap accounts, and the only way to avoid them was to pay more per…