The Money I Want to Give Medium

My Latest Plea to Make Medium the LiveJournal of 2002

Love this article.

$12 a month seems like a lot of money to me. I’m not sure I would sign up for that. For one thing, I hate recurring charges on my credit card. You could get more money out of me through a slow bleed.

I would pay $30 a year for my Medium account just as it is.

There are “add ons” that I think could go with a subscription Medium account.

• I would pay $20 a year for a “following feed”. In other words, I would give Medium $20 a year in order to have a button that takes me to a page that contains ONLY “stories” published by people I follow in strict chronological order (LIFO).
• I would pay $30 a year for my vanity “publication”.
• I would like to have a wallet that I could fill with Medium Money and dispense in micropayments along with my recommends. Let’s say I put 30 bucks in my wallet and then have the ability to set a preference that gives every story I recommend 50 cents. I would be fine with Medium taking 10% of that money.
• I’d pay $10-$20 a year to have a “grammarly” style copy-edit function I could run against my posts.
• I’d pay $10–$20 a year to be able to have some “advanced” formatting functions like centered text, html tables, and a couple other headline options. I really like the readability of Medium and am not even into the publication color schemes, so I don’t want too much just MORE THE THE TROLLS GET WITH THEIR FREE ACCOUNTS.
• I would pay $10 — $20 a year to have access to a stock photo library that I would be licensed to use only on Medium.
• I would pay $10 — $20 a year to have a super “banhammer”. I don’t know what the super banhammer would do that the block function doesn’t already do — Maybe it sends a message saying “Gutbloom BLOCKED YOU and there is no way you can respond unless YOU TOO HAVE A SUPER BANNHAMMER”? — or something like that. I just want to have an icon on my profile that shows I have the super banhammer.

So I’m up to about $160 a year, which is doable. The trick is, I pay for it “a la cart.”

I pay $30 a month for an educators subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud and I NEVER USE IT AND I HATE ADOBE. I think about cancelling it every month.

On the other hand, when I played Team Fortress 2 on Steam I spent $45 dollars in 15 minutes so I could get greased wearing a fireman’s helmet and a pink gas mask. I probably haven’t thought about that purchase since, and, even now, I don’t really regret it.

I played Kingdom’s Live on the iPhone and was a member of the “SinCity” clan of cyberbullies. I spent hundreds of dollars so I could back up my taunts. How does that happen? I don’t know, it’s Friday night, you’re home alone, and you think “shit, I didn’t go out to dinner. For $40 I can stomp this asshole and go to bed happy.” DON’T JUDGE ME.

You don’t want to know what I spent on Farmville in order to grow a field of daffodils big enough to write “My Dick Is Made of Cheddar Cheese.”

I love Medium. I hate my feed. I hate all of the publications and big names Medium has hustled to get and lavished attention on. When they publish that “This Month on Medium” thing and point out that Hilary Clinton had an article on Medium I want to punch the monitor. I can get that crap anywhere.

I won’t go into what I can get on Medium that is hard to find anywhere else. I’ve done that a lot of times before.

I don’t understand why in the “overlapping communities” of Medium I can’t buy my way into a gated one. This is America, right? Let me create my posh friends list so we can tut-tut at the life-hack and self-help people.

Now, we’ve been here a thousand times before. What happens next is that nderground shows up and reminds me about all the subscription-based social media projects that died.