Cracking the Mystery of the Medium Yellow Star
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In this investigative piece, I’ll use my programming skills to get to the very bottom of the case of the mysterious yellow star.
What is the yellow star? No one knows. It just appeared one day in some places of the Medium website — while being conspicuously absent from other places where logic dictates that it should also be — generating a tremendous amount of confusion in this lovely, beautiful and unapologetically sexy community of authors.
Let me quickly repeat this last point: Every writer on Medium is both sexy and smart — at the same time. Every last one of them. That alone is enough reason to put my skills to good use and find out what the heck is going on with the yellow star.
But first, we need to go way back.
What is a star?
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Chilean postmodern author Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus “2666”:
He said that people knew many different kinds of stars or thought they knew many different kinds of stars. He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way.
He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started young.
Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star.
Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn’t know whether what he’s staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they’re dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave.
Having reached this point, [he] warned that stars were one thing, meteors another. Meteors have nothing to do with stars, he said. Meteors, especially if they’re on a direct collision course with the earth, have nothing to do with stars or dreams, though they might have something to do with the notion of breaking away, a kind of breaking away in reverse. […]
Really, when you talk about stars you’re speaking figuratively. That’s metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You’ve used a metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, you say he’s seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it.
But really, there’s just one star and that star isn’t semblance, it isn’t metaphor, it doesn’t come from any dream or any nightmare. We have it right outside. It’s the sun. The sun, I am sorry to say, is our only star.
When I was young I saw a science fiction movie. A rocket ship drifts off course and heads toward the sun. First, the astronauts start to get headaches. Then they’re all dripping sweat and they take off their spacesuits and even so they can’t stop sweating and before long they’re dehydrated. The sun’s gravity keeps pulling them ceaselessly in. The sun begins to melt the hull of the ship. Sitting in his seat, the viewer can’t help feeling hot, too hot to bear. Now I’ve forgotten how it ends. At the last minute they get saved, I seem to recall, and they correct the course of that rocket ship and turn it around toward the earth, and the huge sun is left behind, a frenzied star in the reaches of space.
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666
What is the Medium Yellow Star?
The Medium Yellow star — yellow as our only star, the sun — is also a metaphor. A metaphor for being a Medium Member, and a metaphor for stories that are Member-only.
That’s it, really.
Where to find the Yellow Star?
Point your telescope to the right panel’s profile picture, to the menu when you click on it, and to titles of fellow medium members:
Where to NOT find the Yellow Star?
The yellow star is mysteriously absent from pages that have your profile picture on the header, such as the Stats page. It’s also absent from the picture of members on the Notifications dropdown. In both places, you can still see the legacy “double green circle arcs of membership.”
Why is the Medium Yellow Star absent from some places?
As a professional web developer, I can almost guarantee that your beautiful Medium experience is just a semblance of perfection, as the underlying codebase is surely a mess. This is, of course, no one’s fault — That’s just web development.
And so, the answer to your question is three-fold:
- Maybe some technical reason is delaying the full deployment of the Medium Yellow Star to some places.
- Or maybe the developers simply forgot to add it in those places.
- Or, and this is the darkest possibility, the Medium developers are performing an A/B test to see if users react better to the presence or absence of the Medium Yellow Star in different places. That would guarantee that each of us is experiencing reality in a slightly different way, and that’s just how it is. That’s a consequence of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
What is the Medium Yellow Star made of?
The Medium Yellow Star is an SVG file, as can be seen using any run-of-the-mill web developer toolset in a web browser:
Now, an SVG is a special file format that allows for vector-based graphics. In other words, the Medium Yellow Star is made up of a bunch of mathematical points and sexy curves. It will never be pixelated, you can make it as big or small as you want and it will always look perfect.
To illustrate my point, and as a final gift to you, here’s a humongous version of the Medium Yellow Star:
Closing thoughts
Thanks for making it this far.
You, dear reader, are the real star of Medium. No, seriously. You are. Every time you publish an article, clap for someone, or leave a comment, you make Medium a better place. So keep doing you, and don’t worry too much about the Medium Yellow Star.
P.S. (12. Aug): At the time of writing, the Medium Yellow Star has been deployed to more places. It is safe to assume that it will eventually replace the legacy “double green circle arcs of membership,” if not all of reality.
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