There’s a precedent for this: Erotic models have long offered “Premium Snapchat” subscriptions as a jerry-rigged but safer way to sell nude photography to a curated customer base. (An Instagram spokesperson says the company has no plans to add its own on-platform payment options.) At any rate, Wiley argues that the only weird thing about these arrangements should be the name Instagram chose for the feature. “In calling it Close Friends, Instagram is making it creepier than it has to be,” she says. “It’s not really Close Friends; it’s gated content. Influencers have just figured out a way to hack [the feature] into something that fits in with their business model,” she adds.

Close Friends was introduced in November 2018 as a way to help users deal with context collapse—the uncomfortable reality that not everything a person might post will be received the same way by everyone who could stumble across it. (And, more uncomfortable, for Instagram: that this might cause people to post less.) Employers and admissions officers typically lack a reverence for thirst traps and deep-fried memes; influencers with the incentive to appeal to a broad audience can’t drop the mask or post in-jokes to their actual friends. Inspired by the years-long rise of secret, secondary “finsta” accounts, Close Friends was also a transparent move to recapture the interest of young people who consider Snapchat the best safe space for content they don’t want parents and teachers and lurking weirdos to see.

It wasn’t really supposed to be about money for anyone other than Instagram, but as with Facebook’s before it, Instagram’s choice to officially brand the word friend is not a neutral one. Designating a type of relationship as a feature of an app is going to have strange consequences.

The perfect case study of the implications of Close Friends subscriptions is Caroline Calloway. Calloway, the influencer famous for extremely long captions about her improbably charmed and romantic life (and more recently for a prolonged and confusing debate about whether she’s a scammer or just a mess), started offering her 797,000 followers the option of exclusive paid access to her Close Friends list in August.

Followers who paid $2 a month would become Close Friends, in the Instagram definition of the word, and those who paid $100 a month would become Closest Friends—meaning they would also get a one-hour monthly Skype call. (Calloway offered only 20 spots in the latter group because “there are only so many hours in a month.”) She currently has 342 Close Friends, and her Patreon page promises that when she hits 400 she’ll do an exclusive “orchid hair tutorial.”

As with everything Calloway has done in the past several months, the move was controversial. “Every time I think that Caroline Calloway can’t top her current shenanigans, she just does,” one follower tweeted. “She’s selling friendship on Patreon. Friendship!” Two days into the Close Friends experiment, Calloway posted a photo of her manager and his assistant manually adding people to her Close Friends list for her, which seemed to undercut the friendship proposition even further. (Calloway did not respond to an interview request.)

Mina Hughes, a 22-year-old student in Texas, told me she subscribed out of irrepressible curiosity. Given the extreme intimacy of all that Calloway had already shared, she asked, “How could I not want to see what she deems private enough to put behind a paywall?” But Calloway hasn’t posted much since the first week of the fee, according to Hughes, and most of the content showed up again on her public story later.