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Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Bars
- coleifer 9y agoAlong with these complaints, I wish there was a greater sense of urgency among publishers to reduce page bloat. Some news sites require megabytes of javascript, video, and god-knows-what to display a couple kilobytes of text. It's crazy out there.
- OedipusRex 9y agoAnd they load so slowly that you start to read and then the text shift and now you've lost where you were.
- abeyer 9y agoThe only advantage there is when you can read the whole article before their javascript paywall or anti-adblock script actually loads.
- paulddraper 9y agoHm...better web experience with dial up
- seandougall 9y agoYou know it's bad when one of the threads in your race condition is a human's fingers.
- rdiddly 9y ago"We noticed you're using an ad blocker..."
- dredmorbius 9y agoWashPo...
- rdiddly 9y ago"Why yes, thank you website -- I actually installed it hoping to get into a discussion with you about it. I'm wondering is it wrong for me to use it? Please advise!"
- wmf 9y agoAnd if you act today, we'll throw in a little lightning bolt icon! Oh wait, is AMP good today or evil?
- jim-jim-jim 9y agoI'm on an iPhone 5 and can't adblock without side-loading an app, so I just keep javascript disabled in Safari instead. Keeps these bars from appearing on Medium and everywhere else. They still shouldn't be there in the first place though.
- jccalhoun 9y agothis is yet another reason why people use adblockers and things like noscript
- mindcrime 9y agoThe SEO folks are the same dopes who came up with the genius strategy of requiring 5-10 megabytes of privacy-intrusive CPU-intensive JavaScript on every page load that slows down websites. Now they come to their teams and say, “Our pages are too slow — we gotta move to AMP so our pages load fast.” You gotta admit, that's pretty much spot-on. The resources some of these websites consume is just mind-boggling.
- napsterbr 9y agoBrowsing the web with 5-10 open tabs is enough to use 100% of my cpu (Firefox and chrome). I wonder when and how things got so wrong.
- daveguy 9y agoublock origin + privacy badger and you will have much less usage. I get 10x10 tabs (10 tabs in 10 windows) with few problems.
- ryandrake 9y agoIt should be unacceptable that you have to install plug-ins and disable "features" in order to configure your browser to not be actively destroying the web browsing experience--which is the only experience you expect out of a web browser. Browser vendors need to take some responsibility too.
- Jedd 9y agoAgreed. Ublock Origin's right-click / Block Element (then optional selection process) is an absolute boon to forever hide these artefacts. Every now and then I'll try reading something on mobile chrome, or a friend's machine, and realise how annoying much of the web is for many people.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoI had to turn off JS on mobile chrome for almost all websites, because they just wouldn't run on my phone.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- skewart 9y agoIt's amazing how unpleasant most media sites are to read. Medium may still be better than most, but, like Gruber points out, they've been heading down a bad "growth hacking" path lately. What really blows my mind is how awful so many websites from old publications with high-quality print editions are. A lot of these publications had quality standards for advertisers, and they worked hard to design nice-looking print layouts. As a result, even if there were a lot of ads they were at least unobtrusive and often kind of interesting and worth looking at in and of themselves. But it's like publishers are somehow incapable of thinking about a website the same way they think about a magazine. When I end up on a website that takes fifteen seconds to load, makes text jump around as different ads are displayed and hidden, autoplays video, and pesters me with popups I wonder if anyone who works at the publisher ever actually uses their website. I mean, who, in their right mind, could ever think they were providing an even halfway decent product? I have absolutely no sympathy when legacy publishers who peddle terrible, low-quality product struggle and go out of business. I mean, I hate to see media power consolidating into Facebook's hands, and it sucks when people lose their jobs, but these publishers have no one to blame but themselves.
- Cacti 9y agoI mean, it's puposeful. All of that crap increases accidental page clicks on ads. Most of those aren't useful but every now and then someone pauses at the ad, reads it for longer than usual, and bam, now you've got someone tagged in your tracking metrics as having an interest in whatever's in the ad, and you can target them or sell that info where it can b.e correlated with other data.
- skewart 9y agoOh for sure. You're definitely right about that. It's just short-sighted. Various metrics might go up from month to month or year over year, but they'll drive away their cuatomers over a decade.
- x0x0 9y agoTwo things: 1 - direct response advertisers (obviously not all of them, but a big fraction) care deeply about purchases / test drives / whatever. Interactions that don't lead to purchases don't make money for a publisher. fb pretty thoroughly poisoned the well for advertisers paying for some sort of fleeting social interaction, though Snap is trying. 2 - Everyone here complaining about medium and still reading it... it's like that Woody Allen joke -- Woman one: "The food here is terrible." Woman two: "I know, and such small portions!"
- subpixel 9y agoReddit's 'stop reading this on the slow mobile web and read it in our fast app' persistent dialog is a similar scourge.
- evincarofautumn 9y agoSeems like a lot of companies are trying to go “mobile first” while their apps are still missing core features found on their websites…so I just continue to use the websites, even if they are slower. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in wanting simple things to work. Things like preserving newlines in code blocks in the Reddit app—since 95% of my subs are technical—or showing what comment of mine someone is replying to in the Imgur app—since it might be anything I’ve commented on in the past few days, or years if someone was browsing in Random mode.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoI just don't want 2 dozen 100MB apps on my phone when I can access all the same stuff with 1 100MB app. My phone barely had enough memory for the apps I do want. Their website stops working on my phone? Fine, I stop using their service.
- heartles 9y agoExactly! The number of services that actually need to be an app to accomplish their goal is staggeringly low compared to the number of apps out there. I would far rather use a well-designed website that works for everyone with a web browser over a bloated, ugly app.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe IPO announcement a few months after that abomination showed up was certainly predictable.
- Traubenfuchs 9y agoThey continue doing this although their webapp is working perfectly fine. They are doing it in a very persistent and very annoying way. It keeps me from opening the first thread per browsing session with it's deliberately mislabeled "go back" button, you have to press to not leave the browser.
- joshka 9y agoEven worse are the app based "dickbars". Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc... all seem to think that embedding a webview is the helpful rather than an extra annoying step.
- askafriend 9y agoThey do it because it keeps you in the app more and reduces bounces from native app sessions. I'm saying this with firsthand experience at one of the companies you mentioned.
- icanhackit 9y agoThis doesn't add much to the discussion but the term on-screen “engagement” turds, as Gruber puts it, is what I'll be calling them in the future. Really cuts to the heart of what marketing/business development teams have served up to everyone. I wonder what kind of conversations take place when they're considering implementing this UI bloat. "People love sharing, let's help them share!" Like they're actually helping readers, rather than realize it's a rhetorical lie to help them get past the fact that they have no respect for the end user and are singularly focused on meeting a KPI that will net them more money than the creators of the actual content - you know, the reason why people are even on the fucking website in the first place.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI strongly suspect some sort of cross-marketing / promotional / compensation consideration for many of these.
- CaptSpify 9y ago"If we made it clear what was happening, nobody would ever click on that!" Actual quote from someone I was working with on designing a webpage. He wanted us to basically sign our user's up with his site automatically without them knowing. I feel it applies to most web-design nowadays.
- drewmol 9y agoClick the link and start to read, I am certainly familiar and similarly annoyed with the first complaint: >Every Medium site displays an on-screen “sharing” bar that covers the actual content I want to read. This is particularly annoying on the phone, where screen real estate is most precious. I open the link to the listed example, and mobile.twitter.com covers the top 25% of screen with a login prompt(likely an app store redirect if I take the bait? I use, seldomly, 'Tinfoil' client app from FDroid if I want to login to Twitter), and the bottom 25% with the notice about the ever evolving 'privacy/divulgance' policy. Oy Vey... Really makes me appreciate the few text only, practical UI, bullshit free sites I have left to visit online, like this one.
- noisem4ker 9y agoMaybe you just need to buy one of these new smartphones with a stupidly tall 18:9 display. Jokes aside, screen space on mobile devices stopped being considered precious by publishers and designers long ago.
- imron 9y agoIt's still considered precious by me, and I stop visiting sites on mobile that don't also value it.
- macNchz 9y agoI've had a number of heated discussions over the years about whether some new site/app I'm working on needs these social sharing buttons slathered everywhere. They're absolutely a scourge. In my experience they've often been considered non-negotiable by marketing folks, even when faced with metrics showing that nobody ever actually clicks them.
- yellow_postit 9y agoEven without clicks they act as tracking beacons which is valuable to the publishers selling ads.
- myrandomcomment 9y agoSo I do most of my non-work read of IOS devices. I just avoid / block sites like this. Hey Yelp, when you do not let me go to page 2 in the browser and want to force me to use the app, I stop looking at your site.
- dredmorbius 9y agoIf you ever have 2nd thoughts, you can also generally workaround a block by utilising https://archive.is https://archive.is or https://outline.com https://outline.com Appending the original URL (with a leading "/") to that will open the page directly.
- linkmotif 9y agoThis from the guy whose site is one of the most difficult to read sites on the net. I've always resented this site on so many levels. First among which was its illegibility. Come on now... Also all of the posts from this guy are complaint after complaint. Nothing constructive or interesting ever, just peeve after peeve. Like two weeks ago he complained about FB being closed. Week before that it was something else. Just banal.
- jbigelow76 9y agoThis from the guy whose site is one of the most difficult to read sites on the net. Come on now... Come on, seriously? It's one column of text with one column of navigation and a single small non-animated, non-video ad unit, and the text/background has decent contrast. What's the difficult part? You don't like his opinions fine, but difficult to read that site is not.
- x0x0 9y agoI find the text very small (that's easily remedied); the white on blueish gray to be difficult to read; and most of the space on the page wasted. Even hitting cmd-+ a couple times I can't get text to use more than half the horizontal space.
- JoshMnem 9y agoIf you're using Firefox, click "Reading view" (the book icon). In Chrome the Pocket extension should work.
- andrewingram 9y agoYeah, a baseline font size of 11px is far too small. These days I tend to advocate for 18px or 21px for body copy (Medium is 21px).
- wyclif 9y agoThe design of Gruber's site is very 2010. It looks quite dated now.
- apapli 9y agoTotally agree. I now sigh when I see another article on Medium. It's just so damn frustrating - I come to read the article, I don't want be encouraged to share it before I have even have had the opportunity to read the first paragraph. And don't get me started on the irrelevancy of needing to download a mobile app purely for the purposes of reading what should be a bog-standard web page.
- tragic 9y agoIt seems to be a holdover from the social media goldrush, where no web app was complete without a way to follow people and so on. Thus you 'need' the app to get push notifications about the latest scribblings of your network. Of course, you don't really, because you can just as well follow the same people on Twitter or whatever. Most traditional media orgs don't even have that excuse, of course, and are merely trying to cajole you into reading the stuff in a place where you can't turn off the ads.
- circadiam 9y agoJust pre-pend outline.com/ to any Medium link to remove it.
- JoshMnem 9y ago> "Oh, crap, it’s on Medium." A general suggestion for programming blogs: instead of Medium, try using something like Hexo[1] or Hugo[2] and deploy for free on Github Pages or Netlify. Publishing content is as easy as `hexo deploy` or `git push origin master`. You get complete control with a static site generator and can remove things like the sharing bar and animation. There is almost no maintenance required, because the site will be a collection of static HTML files. [1] https://hexo.io/ https://hexo.io/ [2] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/
- scriptkiddy 9y agoThanks for those suggestions. Hugo looks particularly awesome. I've been wanting to spin up a blog so I can write tutorials and such. I actually started building my own web app from scratch for it because I couldn't find a static site generator I actually liked. Hugo, on the other hand, doesn't look like it could be any easier.
- richie5um 9y agoI've used Hugo for a few sites now. There is a bit of a hump at the start - finding a theme you like and customising it to your needs. But after that it is fantastic.
- JoshMnem 9y agoI haven't tried it yet, but this looks interesting too: https://posativ.org/isso/ https://posativ.org/isso/
- scriptkiddy 9y agoThat looks really well done. I don't think I would use it for my static blog simply because I don't really feel like spinning up a separate server just for comments. Part of the appeal of a static site generator for me is not having to administrate a server. I can just throw it up on Github or Gitlab pages and be done with it.
- outsidetheparty 9y ago
- dredmorbius 9y agoThere's a recent (past couple of months?) website-simplification tool, https://outline.com https://outline.com, which I've been using heavily. Advantages are that it's fast, the styling's pretty good, it works on most sites, and you can simply add it (and a tailing '/') ahead of a URL to view it. I first ran across it on HN. I have no idea who's running it or why, though the domain seems to have been used by a Knight Foundation grantee a few years back. The contact email hasn't answered those questions (though they've answered a few others), and domain registration is through Perfect Privacy. If anyone has any information on this, I'd love to hear it. (I'd submitted an HN item on it a week or two back.) On Chrome/Android, it's what I'm running most long-form content through for reading, as design is simply too annoying (and variable) on too many sites. It's been a few years now that I've said: web design isn't the solution, web design is the problem. The fact that Medium screws this up is particularly ironic for all the reasons Gruber states. Even the NY Times is better viewed via outline.com (or https://archive.is https://archive.is) if you want to be able to select and copy text from it. Such as, say, to look something up. Or quote it in an essay. Otherwise, I see an Internet adpocalypse arriving, sooner rather than later. A browser, or other tool, which simply strips all this crap off and gives a stiff middle finger to site design seems imminent. For the small handful of app-based sites which really need full app status, sure, throw Chrome or Firefox at them. But most stuff doesn't need that.
- newsbinator 9y agohttps://outline.com https://outline.com seems to work great on single articles. Through try it on a feed like https://outline.com/daringfireball.net https://outline.com/daringfireball.net, and it's completely broken. Obviously this is not the use-case though.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThere's a "report problems" link (you may have to load up a working page to see it), which allows you to submit bugs. I've found sites which don't render, render incompletely, or have artifacts (one had, for whatever reason, a framed outline around the text). Letting 'em know what doesn't work may help.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoWhy do people post on medium instead of just posting on their own personal blogs or websites? I understand the appeal for laymen who are not technically inclined, but I see so much content on medium from the ostensibly 'hacker' crowd, and I fail to see why anyone would write there instead of improving their personal brand by posting it on their own sites and blogs. Am I missing something?
- pramodliv1 9y agoBasecamp published an article explaining their migration to Medium https://m.signalvnoise.com/medium-has-been-great-for-us-35d9b0cc665d https://m.signalvnoise.com/medium-has-been-great-for-us-35d9... > People often ask me why we switched to Medium. There were a variety of reasons, but one was reaching a new audience, and another was aiming for wider distribution. But maybe the top one was curiosity — let’s see if we can learn something new.
- CM30 9y agoIn some cases, because they don't own a personal blog or website and don't fancy the hassle of setting one up. So whenever they have an article their existing sites can't host (because it's irrelevant to the topic), they stick it on Medium. For example, I could easily set up a personal site and post my random Medium articles there. But I already run a couple of more important ones with my time, and don't really want to spend time buying another domain, setting up my hosting, installing/customising WordPress and marketing the hell out of it when Medium can give me a decent looking place to put the content for free. There's also a built in audience at Medium. Not necessarily a large one mind you (the platform is much better at amplifying an existing audience than building a new one), but one that may have not come across my articles otherwise. Especially if I post my work in a publication. So that's my take on it anyway.
- Doctor_Fegg 9y agoAn HN commenter pointed me towards this bookmarklet recently, which removes such 'dickbars'. I find it invaluable, especially as someone who presses Space to page through an article. (I've modified it to ensure that the page body is always scrollable, which is something that goes hand-in-hand with dickbars.) javascript:(function () {document.body.style['overflow-y']=document.body.style['overflow']='auto'; var i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i=0;i<elements.length;i++) {if (getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='sticky') {elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})();
- CodeWriter23 9y agoAnd the scourge of that fucking "Open in App" button. THAT alone makes me hate Medium. I understand people's ire at the persistent sharing bar, but that doen't bother me nearly as much.
- franciscop 9y agoA small reminder to throw some money to Ghost if you can and that it's an amazing open source publishing platform actually focused on the reading experience: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- JoshMnem 9y agoYou can add this bookmarklet to the Firefox or Chrom[e|ium] bookmarks bar to remove it with one click: javascript:document.getElementsByClassName('js-stickyFooter')[0].remove();
- johny115 9y agoeven better, you can have certain page elements removed permanently without any clicking ... with adblocker uBlock Origin you can right click page elements and block them, I "cleaned" the UI of many apps I use like this ... I often hide bars like this or even whole menu sections or features that I just don't use and would only add to the clutter
- magic_beans 9y agoI just downloaded it right now. This is AMAZING. Usually I spend a minute or going into the console and deleting nodes all over the place. This is much easier!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- SwellJoe 9y agoI've just noticed that Medium has also broken the back button (at least in Firefox for Linux). That's a pet peeve of mine, and it makes me angrier than most dark patterns because it's so damned pointless. Like, do you think I'm not going to leave because it takes multiple actions? Or that I'll be anything but less likely to return to a site that hijacks navigation for no reason? I dunno. So common, and so nonsensical.
- strict9 9y agoMore often than not, it's just a bug. A side effect of the react/vuejs SPA world we live in. Fewer pageloads can be a good thing, but if not engineered properly, a much worse user experience than perceived faster loading. Using the History api correctly is trickier than most people think.
- SwellJoe 9y agoI guess I would buy that, and I've had my own (mostly lost) battles with the history API. I just expect better of a company like Medium. It's their thing, ya know? Being readable, clean, serious, non-intrusive. If Medium isn't that, they're just another random blogging platform.
- birksherty 9y agoThat's why I love Firefox's Reader View button on the address bar. I click it even before the page loading completes and instantly clean view.
- pmontra 9y agoI'm using uBlock to pick and hide all those elements that steal space on the screen of my phone. It's a much better browsing experience. I won't use those buttons anyway. It's one of the reasons I'm using Firefox even if Opera has text reflow. Sometimes I wish there is an Open in Opera addon.
- floatboth 9y agohttps://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/ https://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/
- wgx 9y agoThe market will decide. People moved to Medium because it was so user-friendly and ad-free. People will move to the next thing (whatever that is) for the same reasons.
- Pxtl 9y agoI have to admit I actually use social sharing buttons because fb on mobile (the site, not the app) somehow doesn't create a link preview when I copy-paste URLs like it does on desktop. So often a social sharing button is the easiest way to post an interesting article to my fb. But that's entirely a workaround for as stupid bug in a zillion dollar website. Everything sucks.
- coldcode 9y agoMy fav feature in iOS/MacOS next is the ability to stop autoplay video. I would rather dodge dickbars than fight the cleverly blocked pause button and jumpy video box. If I want to play your video I will click play.
- endemic 9y agoObligatory link to a "kill sticky headers" bookmarklet: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ This has saved me a great deal of annoyance, especially on my smaller-screened mobile phone.
- roryisok 9y agoI agree with the sentiment, but Gruber can't seem to write a simple article without name checking multiple Apple products and services. They're completely irrelevant here but he still manages to mention his iPad pro review unit and how great safari is.
- bluedino 9y agoAnyone who uses light gray on dark grey for their blog shouldn't be complaining about Medium. >> Safari already has a built-in Sharing button. It has all the options for sharing I need. And the people that don't use Safari?
- falcolas 9y agoFirefox has the same. Not sure about chrome, but given the ubiquity of the share bar in iOS, I'd be moderately surprised if it wasn't there.
- kitsunesoba 9y agoChrome on iOS also gives you a share button (albeit buried under a dot-hamburger menu). Even if no native share button is available, I wouldn't use any share button provided by the website. Those rarely do what I want them to. I'd just copy the URL and paste it wherever i need it to go.
- idbehold 9y agoYou spelled the same color two different ways.
- johndoe489 9y ago> When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Is John Gruber that gullible? Most startups out there are led by someone with a "messiah syndrome". They all believe they are going to change the world; but really it's all about money. Find a "niche" and then juice it till it bleeds, they have no other purpose everything else is just PR. Or worse, "rationalization" where the person actually belives all their own bullshit. Medium's builtin design and clean UI also gives an aura of professionalism to a lot of shitty writing. Good luck getting a feed that works for you. My feed was continuously assaulted by random feminist rants with clickbait drama titles. I also love how they write completely meaningless update notes for the iOS app. Eventually they were called out for it on the iOS app when they posted a huge block of morse code in lieu of actual update notes. Then in the following updates, they add some sarcastic message in their iOS update notes mocking their own users who were unhappy with their random/meaningless update notes. What a bunch of losers. Also their recommendation system sucks. And your feed routinely gets articles "recommended for you" without any reason given (some say "because you follow Such-and-such-Tag, but many don't). And even putting my rant aside, what do we have to gain from centralizing all expression through a few controlled gates like Facebook or Medium? Who gains from this?
- spenrose 9y agoGruber's site (1) attracts one of the richest advertising targets in the world, iOS developers (2) serves as a leader for directly monetizable media such as speaking events and podcasts aimed at the same elite audience. His business model enables his reading model. Also, which is more distracting: a "dickbar" or Gruber interrupting his podcast to read a spiel?
- ingenuous2 9y agoThe dickbar, by far. The spiel is a momentary interruption, usually delivered w/in the flow.
- Digit-Al 9y agoIf you expect all your journalism for free you'll end up with journalism that is worth exactly what you paid for it.
- everybodyknows 9y agoTrue enough. And yet, now that the Internet gives us choice across 100+ publishers with a few keystrokes to query the browsing history database, how do we pay the journalists?
- ungzd 9y agoBloggers using Medium is primarily from the same camp as who added these "UI/UX enhancers": smug post-hipster developers who worship all these things like "growth", "disruption", "engagement", "UI/UX", "mobile-first" and companies like Uber and Snapchat. Medium is the most cancerous and disgusting blog service ever.