Thanks to @hermez777 for making this photo available freely on Unsplash

When I first heard about the membership program Medium was introducing, I didn’t think much of it. Pay for a better reading experience - no thanks, that’s not what I’m here for. I remember at the time there was a plethora of articles on Medium’s financial evaluation, and how the membership program would inevitably fail, as so many others had that tried to charge for content. I quietly agreed, still believing that the best model for creators was through a crowdsourcing platform like Patreon or Kickstarter.

I continued using the site as it was. I’d get a few emails here and there asking me to become a founding member, a couple of inapp notifications along the same lines, and I happily ignored them. Then I start seeing these three words on my home feed.

Medium members only

I didn’t have a problem with this. It seemed innocent enough, show what non-member users were missing. Medium is a business, they’re trying to make money. Besides, it was just one story on my entire home feed. But one turned into two, and two turned into most of my feed, and I had quite enough of that. So I wrote this chrome extension to remove medium members only stories. (source code)