14 ms·

Show HN: Make Medium Readable Again

193 points by thebaer 9y ago

revmoo 9y ago
Can you kill the popups too? That stuff is annoying I can't believe web developers in 2017 are back to doing awful 1990s crap again.
dimillian 9y ago
I don't see how it can be useful. Here for example, I just have to scroll a little (little) bit and all the bar are gone. https://blog.mindorks.com/understanding-interpolators-in-android-ce4e8d1d71cd https://blog.mindorks.com/understanding-interpolators-in-and... Am I on some sort of special version?
- rovek 9y ago
  You must be on some sort of special version. Scrolling provides me with an additional social bar and removes nothing
  - thebaer 9y ago
    You'll get a different (less annoying) experience if you're logged in. However if you haven't logged in on a Medium site (these [0][1] might be some), you'll get the annoying sticky bars. [0] https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-influencers-in-a-digital-age-28c251df4018 https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-influencers-in-a-digital-... [1] https://imrat.com/medium-custom-domain-cloudflare-db76b8a9b284 https://imrat.com/medium-custom-domain-cloudflare-db76b8a9b2...
luke3butler 9y ago
Userscript Version: https://gist.github.com/luke3butler/3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2b04dd49c https://gist.github.com/luke3butler/3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2...
Tick2Time 9y ago
It seems to be commonly regarded that Medium has the most excremental reading experience of any publishing platform. Remember when they used to publish blog articles about making the web a better reading experience? That seems a bad joke now. So Medium have trashed their brand. But my question is: do they know? Do they care? Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? What's going on?
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  > do they know? Maybe > Do they care? Sure, if they know. > Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? Doubtful >What's going on? They don't know how to monetize any better than any other web site. They're following what other sites do to try and engage the people who do visit Medium longer. The problem is, what works for sites where the reading experience is secondary doesn't work for a site whose reading experience is primary. Somehow they either don't know that or cannot think of anything better to try.
  - true_religion 9y ago
    They're probably seeing an uptick in signups, subscriptions, and all the other metrics they care about---so they keep going down the rabbit hole of adding more modals and call to actions, and popunders. They don't realize at the end of that track is a brick wall of 0% growth as new visitors are instantly turned off. If I werent' already committed to using Medium, I'd click away the instant I saw the site as it reminds me too much of spam-blog pages.
    - carapace 9y ago
      I just reached the point of "ew, no" when I'm about to click a link that I can see is going to go to Medium due to the popups that start, "You've read N articles on Medium, ..." I can't recall what the rest says because by the time I've scanned the first part I've already right-clicked to "inspect" to delete the element. (Then I cleared all Medium cookies, but that doesn't prevent them from showing the popup again, and it still has the N so obviously they are storing it server-side. :-( ) Bleah.
chrismorgan 9y ago
This is the sort of thing that is probably typically better handled via a user stylesheet; one I found from a quick search: https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bottom-and-upper-banners https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bot... This extension, however, has the advantage that it checks for a <meta property="al:ios:app_name" content="Medium"> in the document instead of applying to a hardcoded set of domains.
- thebaer 9y ago
  Yep, a user stylesheet would easily do the trick. And a nicely-packaged extension makes it accessible to more people, especially non-technical users.
  - O1111OOO 9y ago
    > And a nicely-packaged extension makes it accessible to more people, especially non-technical users. I followed the links on parent comment. Installed Stylish for FF[0] to manage userStyles. The link provided by parent[1] now shows install style:) After installing the userStyle, medium is so much more readable as default without me having to click an extra 'readability' button to reload. Very nice! I'm going to have a lot of fun experimenting with some other (annoying) sites. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/stylish/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/stylish/ [1] https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bottom-and-upper-banners https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bot...
qaz_plm 9y ago
Anything to help make the comment section of Medium more usable?
- tandav 9y ago
  Comment section wasn't designed to be usable.
- thebaer 9y ago
  How would you like to see it improved?
  - qaz_plm 9y ago
    If there was a way to get all of the comments to show inline per their thread on the main page that would be helpful. Having to click a link, go to another page, have that page jump around on you and still need to click another link to show the replies is pretty terrible. Here's a GIF of my gripe: http://imgur.com/a/35YJs http://imgur.com/a/35YJs
- ryanswapp 9y ago
  Seriously. I also don't like that every comment is a new post so if you look at your posts every comment you've ever written shows up as a post.
- anitil 9y ago
  Oh god please. On a related note, I tried to follow the RSS feed for a few people on medium and every single comment by the author comes up as a new item, leading to a flood every time they're active on the sire.
OverThere 9y ago
Wow. Thanks for creating this awesome tool. I've felt the same for a long time.
Fergusman 9y ago
This has slowly been driving me insane. I will for sure use this. I'd think the bars would be common criticisms and medium would have done something to limit them by now.
pmx 9y ago
I wish there was something I could do like this on mobile. I've given up trying to read these pages on my phone now, it's just too distracting to have all their UI clutter in the way. What I don't understand is how they let it get this bad?
- kingbirdy 9y ago
  Because if they put more things on your screen, you'll click more things, driving up their revenue when you inevitably click an ad
- steventhedev 9y ago
  Firefox for Android has both reader mode which works fairly well with Medium, and you can install uBlock Origin, which declutters most mobile sites from ads (not sticky headers though). Not sure how it got this bad, but there are ways to solve it for all sites (reader mode)
- mbid 9y ago
  Firefox mobile supports extensions.
- gargs 9y ago
  I downloaded this app called 'Unobstruct' the other day. It does just this for mobile safari. https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/unobstruct/id1255281426?l=en&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/unobstruct/id1255281426?l=en...
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    Been looking for something like this for months. Trying it out right now!
- gtnou34snteuo 9y ago
  I use Safari's Reader mode to get rid of this stuff and modal dialog pop-ups asking me to subscribe or whatever they're asking. I also use Firefox Focus to remove ads on iOS or Adblock for Safari on desktop.
StavrosK 9y ago
While I applaud the effort, I think you should vote with your X button and stop reading articles that have a hostile UI.
- martin-adams 9y ago
  I disagree, the action taken to create an extension and get it on HN sparks the discussion that can trigger real change. A boycott only works when you have a sufficient number of people doing the same, or in this case, a sufficient number of people bypassing the hostile UI.
- thebaer 9y ago
  In theory I agree, but reality makes that difficult to adhere to. To me, 15 minutes throwing a browser extension together is worth not being assaulted when I end up on a Medium-powered site. Same reasons I use an ad-blocker.
- gkya 9y ago
  Unfortunately lots of information is hostage to bad web design. I would really like to vote with my X button the web pages and apps of my uni, but instead I have to write scrapers to extract RSS feeds from their JS mess or else I can't know what's going on. Oh, the other option is to follow them on Facebook or Twitter. Also, the news sites often have hostile UIs, but one needs at least one of them.
boramalper 9y ago
You can also use uBlock (or any sufficiently sophisticated ad/content blocker) to block certain elements just by pointing your pointer at them. See: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker
- kronos29296 9y ago
  One shouldn't spend 2 minutes blocking elements in a page that you would read hardly 5 minutes. That's counter productive and annoying and should be automated. An extension helps in that.
  - fmoralesc 9y ago
    The picker creates rules that are persistent, so it would be 2 minutes over however many times you visit the site. Not too dissimilar to looking for the extension and installing it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - passivepinetree 9y ago
      That's what I thought as well, but I repeatedly find myself blocking the same elements on Medium. Maybe there's some element of randomization in the ids of the offending elements, or else I'm using the extension wrong and only creating temporary rules somehow.
alekratz 9y ago
Makes me think of Kill Sticky [0], a small Javascript thing that attempts to remove all sticky headers on a page. But really, any sort of thing that blocks, as the Github README says, "annoying, user-hostile software", is a good piece of software in my book. [0] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
- OverThere 9y ago
  This is pretty sweet. Thanks for sharing.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Interestingly, this doesn’t kill all sticky headers. In fact, there’s a special CSS position for sticky headers: position: sticky. Which this doesn’t kill.
  - tim333 9y ago
    I made an extention doing the same thing and added an == 'fixed' || === 'sticky' recently. It's an ongoing battle. I still haven't figured returning google news to a decent look. (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbkoefoepgmeifoglafkomgjbge https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbko...)
    - nickjj 9y ago
      Do you somehow differentiate sticky headers from sidebars? For example my personal site uses a sticky sidebar for primary navigation and if you hide it, you won't be able to browse anything.
      - tim333 9y ago
        No, my thing doesn't differentiate but it does toggle so if you click it again the nav stuff comes back.
aembleton 9y ago
Does anyone have a problem with Medium on Firefox? For me, it doesn't have the top and bottom bars. I've switched uBlock off and this is still the case. Is all of this extra chrome, a Chrome only thing or some A/B testing? I do see the problems on Chrome. https://medium.com/@andrey_cheptsov/making-java-code-easier-to-read-without-changing-it-adeebd5c36de https://medium.com/@andrey_cheptsov/making-java-code-easier-...
- jplatte 9y ago
  I see them in Firefox, with uBlock installed and active. This problem is easily solved by clicking the reader mode button in the url bar though.
Aardwolf 9y ago
Hacker news is easier to read on mobile than many so called made for mobile sites. It's as if made for mobile means: "abuse the small mobile screen to show as much as possible spammy bars and social network buttons on it and make them even bigger when you zoom in, while hiding actually relevant information that you can see on the desktop version of the site" While IMHO mobile optimized should mean: wrap the text automatically at the width of the screen, in a readable size in portrait mode, don't hide anything that's visible on the desktop site (like dates, user comments, version history, ...), and support zooming in in a sane way Even Wikipedia fails at showing the user comments pages and sane zooming in of pictures (it's always those sticky bars that ruin it)
- kuschku 9y ago
  One major change HN would need on mobile would be making the click target for actions (up/down vote, reply, etc) larger. Currently I need to zoom in every time to click any of them.
  - swiley 9y ago
    No. I'm fine zooming in or trying multiple times, I spend much more time trying to read which becomes harder when more and more of the screen is taken up by things that are not text.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
      They could make the up/down arrows taller, but not wider. This would prevent fat-fingering the wrong vote, and would not take space from text.
    - whostolemyhat 9y ago
      Yes. It's annoying having workarounds for basic site functionality.
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      There are other ways to do this. The arrows could be put to the right of the [-] icon and wider apart.
dudul 9y ago
A possible improvement: automatically remove all the f-ing animated gifs people think they really really must insert in between each paragraph.
- onorton 9y ago
  This annoys me to no end. I'm reading a (supposedly) serious article. Not a Buzzfeed listicle.
- thebaer 9y ago
  Love it. If you file a GH issue I'll remember, and add that as an option.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  https://github.com/krasimir/gifffer https://github.com/krasimir/gifffer may help
- kentt 9y ago
  Absolutely horrible for readability. Nothing makes me give up on an article faster.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    I've written some ... spicy ... emails to The New York Times over this practice. I tend to go to a W3M dump instead.
primitivesuave 9y ago
This is awesome and will hopefully prod the developers at Medium to rethink the design (if your users need a Chrome extension to make your product usable, it's got some immediate problems that deserve a resolution). The sticky nav bars are really just terrible, and sometimes render parts of the page completely unreadable. It's surprising that these problems were not caught during basic usability testing. Thank you OP for fixing them!
- edoceo 9y ago
  It's not the engineers, it's the managers.
davidgerard 9y ago
Remember the good old days, when Medium prided itself on being beautiful and readable?
- bhrgunatha 9y ago
  Website readability in general has degraded seriously in recent years. Flat buttons/links that can't be discerned as clickable, low contrast text, the resurgence of mystery meat navigation and plenty more annoyances I don't even remember. Luckily we have better tools these days to combat them. The fact that firefox has a built in reader mode is indicative of how user hostile web readability is these days.
- CM30 9y ago
  Yep. That seems to be a trend with user content driven sites. They start off promising a clean, minimalistic look (like Medium, Imgur, Reddit, etc) and then gradually end up cluttering their site with more and more useless trinkets. Indeed, it's so bad for image sharing sites that they seem to get replaced every year or two when the last one starts becoming more and more hostile towards their users' experience.
  - irq-1 9y ago
    "Brands" generally follow the same pattern: grow the base, then cheapen the products to increase profits. Eventually the Brand will be replaced with the next big thing, or the Brand will survive long enough to provide a consistent product that people accept.
- shopkins 9y ago
  Man, those were the days. Though I guess it's managed to keep them at the top, perched on top of people who still think it's The Best Place to Host Your Content™
  - intoverflow2 9y ago
    Wondering if the Medium faithful realise the lack of respect Medium has for their writing when you're not logged in [0]. [0] https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/1142179/large_419d82d232ff2cd5e0f8155396bd7dc2.png https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/1142179/large_419d82d2...
christophilus 9y ago
I use Firefox in reader mode. Works like a charm. Firefox mobile also has this feature which has become indispensable for me.
- cJ0th 9y ago
  I'said it before, I'll say it again: ctrl+alt+r However, while it is lovely when it does work, it crashes my browser rather often.
thinkMOAR 9y ago
(in my humble opinion) they should just as much look at the content they publish as how they publish it. The amount of clickbait quality articles on medium is sky rocket high.
softinio 9y ago
Funny thing is I avoid reading hackernoon blogs because of the green banner hurting my eyes. Not trying to be funny but I genuinely find it uncomfortable. So interesting that in the README file of this project hackernoon is shown as the example lol
- gnicholas 9y ago
  Yeah, and as a contributor I have been surprised to see that they are now injecting (neon green) advertising banners into some of my articles. I don't mind it at the bottom, but I don't love it at the top.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  You save any Medium article to Instapaper and read a readable version with your readability settings. That's what I'm doing now for stuff more than a few minutes long.
ynak 9y ago
A bit off topic, but why does Medium add random numbers and chars at the end of their URLs like the example below[0]? That's annoying and distracting when referring from other platforms. Is that a git hash or something? If so, can I check revise history of the article? [0] https://medium.com/@soleoshao/how-i-used-docker-for-latex-on-mac-os-yosemite-cd29c0713cad https://medium.com/@soleoshao/how-i-used-docker-for-latex-on...
- MattBearman 9y ago
  The hash at the end of the URL is actually the article ID, the part before that is just for SEO/readability, and has no affect on loading the article. e.g.: omitting the article title from the URL still works (https://medium.com/@soleoshao/cd29c0713cad https://medium.com/@soleoshao/cd29c0713cad) as does changing it to something else entirely (https://medium.com/@soleoshao/i-like-turtles-cd29c0713cad https://medium.com/@soleoshao/i-like-turtles-cd29c0713cad) Both those URLs still load the article in question.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tedmiston 9y ago
  The other random numbers they used to add after the article ID were for tracking purposes but it seems like they recently backed off on those.
pmlnr 9y ago
Firefox -> URL bar -> click ::book icon:: -> read. EDIT. Huh. No astral plane unicode allowed in HN comments.
Rjevski 9y ago
It's really sad to see Medium turning into this. I used to like Medium, now I avoid any site that uses them (which is getting harder as they now allow custom domains).
userbinator 9y ago
It's amazing how many sites, Medium included, become so much more readable just by turning off CSS and JavaScript. Sure, they look far more bland and become less interactive, but I came for the content and not the author's idea of "design".
- WalterSear 9y ago
  Contemporary design is overly focused on curb appeal. IMHO, it's an understated problem. IMHO, the cause is a combination of commercialism and of visual designers being inculcated with inappropriate values and training from traditional print design.
  - ashark 9y ago
    > IMHO, the cause is a combination of commercialism and of visual designers being inculcated with inappropriate values and training from traditional print design. I judge that it got a lot worse around the time the print-trained designers started to be pushed out of decision-making positions by the digital-trained ones.
    - WalterSear 9y ago
      I'm not sure I follow. Web design hasn't gone downhill over time - it's definitely improving, simply because the tools have allowed it do so. Perhaps you could provide some examples from the era of print designers and the era after them? What I have observed has been that, while technology has allowed screens to become a more expressive design medium, visual designers tend to be content to cargo-cult techniques from the static, vastly simpler, and more expansive medium of print, and it shows.
      - ashark 9y ago
        I think we probably disagree about what good design is. I think that precisely > static, vastly simpler is the right way to go. This is mere consistency on my part. I hated (most) Flash sites back in the day, and wasteful giant images, et c. I hate (most) JS/CSS cycle-burner sites and giant wasteful images today. Consistency is good. Shit not moving around on my screen is good. Controls working the usual way is good. Consistency, predictability, and clarity are good UX. The basic 2-or-3-column layout with a thin header was fine, with maybe some tweaks for smaller screens these days. Early-period web's allergy to non-content large media files was good. Design mostly gets in the way, while making everything more expensive. I think its function was described perfectly by someone the last time we had a design thread: it's peacock feathers. Keeping up with design trends is harmful to function, but signals wealth (=stability, reliability, social proof of value) precisely because it's so costly and pointless. This doesn't mean it improves my experience on the Web.
cabalamat 9y ago
I use Kill Sticky for this: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
JoshMnem 9y ago
I'm waiting for "Show HN: How to blog with a static site generator". Medium is getting to be too much. If you're a programmer, at least use a static site generator (Metalsmith, Hugo, Hexo, etc.). You can deploy to Github pages with git or via drag-and-drop to a service like Netlify.
namuol 9y ago
Dear web designers: Tall screen? Use a topbar. Wide screen? Use a sidebar.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I'd actually strongly encourage using a non-fixed set of bottom navigation in most instances. I'm increasingly finding sidebars ... bad.
kentt 9y ago
I use Just Read[1] for things like this. It attempts to pull out the relevant text and put it in a user editable style sheet (the default is fine for many). [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpmmkibanfdgjocnabmcaclkmod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpm...
gkya 9y ago
What are the alternatives to Medium?
- CM30 9y ago
  Static website generators and GitHub pages, WordPress.com, Blogger, typical hosting sites. I think some forums and Reddit style link aggregators have places for longform content too. I was considering my own direct alternative to the site, but at the moment I have other things to work on.
  - gkya 9y ago
    AFAIK Medium's selling point is the network, i.e. the easy access to potential followers. My website is static via org-publish, but nobody knows it and if I wanted to popularise it I'd have to do many things. With these networks+hosting services like Medium and Tumblr all you have to do is put some tags. I was asking for this sort of alternatives.
    - CM30 9y ago
      Then I'll say that I'm working on something similar, it's just not ready at the moment. I'm retooling my gaming site into a gaming alternative to Medium and the likes, and will hopefully launch a general version for all subjects at a later date.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  My short list would be a self-hosted blog (static site), Reddit (what I'm actually using), Wordpress. Github has some blogging options that I've been meaning to look at, and might also be an option. I've been looking for a better solution, and Medium have pretty much elected themselves out of consideration with their recent directions, styling and otherwise. No confidence.
- shopkins 9y ago
  OP mentions a similar platform he made, Write.as, in the README. It doesn't do as much as Medium (I think that's on purpose) but they have a small Medium-like network for authors there [0]. I've been on it for over a year [1] and really enjoying the simplicity myself. [0] https://read.write.as https://read.write.as [1] https://shopkins.writeas.com https://shopkins.writeas.com
odammit 9y ago
One of my favorite things about Medium posts is the completely irrelevant hi res image that they nag you to add. Definitely contributes to the story. Clap clap clap.
asdffdsa321 9y ago
Thought this was referring to the decline of its content at first
ghostly_s 9y ago
I for one am shocked, shocked, that independent publishers colluded with a single company in establishing a near-monopoly in hosted content delivery because of their "publisher-friendly policies" and said company is now taking advantage of that position.
aloukissas 9y ago
Stop. Using. "Make X Y/Great Again". Headlines. Thanks, Pretty much everybody
- blackrose 9y ago
  The formula works! If it can get that guy in the White House, it can sell anything. Also, I think it's kind of delicious when a variant like this is used to actually describe a previously "Y/Great" thing (Medium was readable at some point). Kinda hijacks the meaning from the original phrase and makes it less shitty.
_asummers 9y ago
Does this kill the share on highlight crap? If so, you have another install.
- romuloab42 9y ago
  It does work surprisingly well without Javascript, so you might want to try that. Not sure if the linked extension would work without JS, though.
- Myztiq 9y ago
  I had the same problem. Found this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/medium-highlight-off/lfhbdbplpphacepapppdobnenkfimagn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/medium-highlight-o...
_pmf_ 9y ago
Basically every online newspaper is much, much worse than Medium. I don't get all the whining.
kristerv 9y ago
thank you...
talles 9y ago
It's me getting old and grumpy or was it really better back in the days of Greasemonkey?
santa_boy 9y ago
Thank you. Just FYI ... I use the [Mercury Reader Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/oknpjjbmpnndlpmnhmekjpocelpnlfdi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/okn...) which works fantastic! An added benefit, is its ability to send the article to my Kindle to read later at leisure.
edwinyzh 9y ago
Is there anything like this for Gmail? The two large sticky bars (the bar where the search box is on, and the toolbar bar) are wasting too much of my screen estate. Thanks in advance.

193 points by thebaer 9y ago

Can you kill the popups too? That stuff is annoying I can't believe web developers in 2017 are back to doing awful 1990s crap again.

dimillian 9y ago

I don't see how it can be useful. Here for example, I just have to scroll a little (little) bit and all the bar are gone. https://blog.mindorks.com/understanding-interpolators-in-android-ce4e8d1d71cd https://blog.mindorks.com/understanding-interpolators-in-and... Am I on some sort of special version?

rovek 9y ago
You must be on some sort of special version. Scrolling provides me with an additional social bar and removes nothing
- thebaer 9y ago
  You'll get a different (less annoying) experience if you're logged in. However if you haven't logged in on a Medium site (these [0][1] might be some), you'll get the annoying sticky bars. [0] https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-influencers-in-a-digital-age-28c251df4018 https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-influencers-in-a-digital-... [1] https://imrat.com/medium-custom-domain-cloudflare-db76b8a9b284 https://imrat.com/medium-custom-domain-cloudflare-db76b8a9b2...

luke3butler 9y ago

Userscript Version: https://gist.github.com/luke3butler/3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2b04dd49c https://gist.github.com/luke3butler/3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2...

Tick2Time 9y ago

It seems to be commonly regarded that Medium has the most excremental reading experience of any publishing platform. Remember when they used to publish blog articles about making the web a better reading experience? That seems a bad joke now. So Medium have trashed their brand. But my question is: do they know? Do they care? Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? What's going on?

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
> do they know? Maybe > Do they care? Sure, if they know. > Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? Doubtful >What's going on? They don't know how to monetize any better than any other web site. They're following what other sites do to try and engage the people who do visit Medium longer. The problem is, what works for sites where the reading experience is secondary doesn't work for a site whose reading experience is primary. Somehow they either don't know that or cannot think of anything better to try.
- true_religion 9y ago
  They're probably seeing an uptick in signups, subscriptions, and all the other metrics they care about---so they keep going down the rabbit hole of adding more modals and call to actions, and popunders. They don't realize at the end of that track is a brick wall of 0% growth as new visitors are instantly turned off. If I werent' already committed to using Medium, I'd click away the instant I saw the site as it reminds me too much of spam-blog pages.
  - carapace 9y ago
    I just reached the point of "ew, no" when I'm about to click a link that I can see is going to go to Medium due to the popups that start, "You've read N articles on Medium, ..." I can't recall what the rest says because by the time I've scanned the first part I've already right-clicked to "inspect" to delete the element. (Then I cleared all Medium cookies, but that doesn't prevent them from showing the popup again, and it still has the N so obviously they are storing it server-side. :-( ) Bleah.

chrismorgan 9y ago

This is the sort of thing that is probably typically better handled via a user stylesheet; one I found from a quick search: https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bottom-and-upper-banners https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bot... This extension, however, has the advantage that it checks for a <meta property="al:ios:app_name" content="Medium"> in the document instead of applying to a hardcoded set of domains.

thebaer 9y ago
Yep, a user stylesheet would easily do the trick. And a nicely-packaged extension makes it accessible to more people, especially non-technical users.
- O1111OOO 9y ago
  > And a nicely-packaged extension makes it accessible to more people, especially non-technical users. I followed the links on parent comment. Installed Stylish for FF[0] to manage userStyles. The link provided by parent[1] now shows install style:) After installing the userStyle, medium is so much more readable as default without me having to click an extra 'readability' button to reload. Very nice! I'm going to have a lot of fun experimenting with some other (annoying) sites. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/stylish/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/stylish/ [1] https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bottom-and-upper-banners https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bot...

qaz_plm 9y ago

Anything to help make the comment section of Medium more usable?

tandav 9y ago
Comment section wasn't designed to be usable.
thebaer 9y ago
How would you like to see it improved?
- qaz_plm 9y ago
  If there was a way to get all of the comments to show inline per their thread on the main page that would be helpful. Having to click a link, go to another page, have that page jump around on you and still need to click another link to show the replies is pretty terrible. Here's a GIF of my gripe: http://imgur.com/a/35YJs http://imgur.com/a/35YJs
ryanswapp 9y ago
Seriously. I also don't like that every comment is a new post so if you look at your posts every comment you've ever written shows up as a post.
anitil 9y ago
Oh god please. On a related note, I tried to follow the RSS feed for a few people on medium and every single comment by the author comes up as a new item, leading to a flood every time they're active on the sire.

OverThere 9y ago

Wow. Thanks for creating this awesome tool. I've felt the same for a long time.

Fergusman 9y ago

This has slowly been driving me insane. I will for sure use this. I'd think the bars would be common criticisms and medium would have done something to limit them by now.

pmx 9y ago

I wish there was something I could do like this on mobile. I've given up trying to read these pages on my phone now, it's just too distracting to have all their UI clutter in the way. What I don't understand is how they let it get this bad?

kingbirdy 9y ago
Because if they put more things on your screen, you'll click more things, driving up their revenue when you inevitably click an ad
steventhedev 9y ago
Firefox for Android has both reader mode which works fairly well with Medium, and you can install uBlock Origin, which declutters most mobile sites from ads (not sticky headers though). Not sure how it got this bad, but there are ways to solve it for all sites (reader mode)
mbid 9y ago
Firefox mobile supports extensions.
gargs 9y ago
I downloaded this app called 'Unobstruct' the other day. It does just this for mobile safari. https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/unobstruct/id1255281426?l=en&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/unobstruct/id1255281426?l=en...
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Been looking for something like this for months. Trying it out right now!
gtnou34snteuo 9y ago
I use Safari's Reader mode to get rid of this stuff and modal dialog pop-ups asking me to subscribe or whatever they're asking. I also use Firefox Focus to remove ads on iOS or Adblock for Safari on desktop.

StavrosK 9y ago

While I applaud the effort, I think you should vote with your X button and stop reading articles that have a hostile UI.

martin-adams 9y ago
I disagree, the action taken to create an extension and get it on HN sparks the discussion that can trigger real change. A boycott only works when you have a sufficient number of people doing the same, or in this case, a sufficient number of people bypassing the hostile UI.
thebaer 9y ago
In theory I agree, but reality makes that difficult to adhere to. To me, 15 minutes throwing a browser extension together is worth not being assaulted when I end up on a Medium-powered site. Same reasons I use an ad-blocker.
gkya 9y ago
Unfortunately lots of information is hostage to bad web design. I would really like to vote with my X button the web pages and apps of my uni, but instead I have to write scrapers to extract RSS feeds from their JS mess or else I can't know what's going on. Oh, the other option is to follow them on Facebook or Twitter. Also, the news sites often have hostile UIs, but one needs at least one of them.

boramalper 9y ago

You can also use uBlock (or any sufficiently sophisticated ad/content blocker) to block certain elements just by pointing your pointer at them. See: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker

kronos29296 9y ago
One shouldn't spend 2 minutes blocking elements in a page that you would read hardly 5 minutes. That's counter productive and annoying and should be automated. An extension helps in that.
- fmoralesc 9y ago
  The picker creates rules that are persistent, so it would be 2 minutes over however many times you visit the site. Not too dissimilar to looking for the extension and installing it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - passivepinetree 9y ago
    That's what I thought as well, but I repeatedly find myself blocking the same elements on Medium. Maybe there's some element of randomization in the ids of the offending elements, or else I'm using the extension wrong and only creating temporary rules somehow.

alekratz 9y ago

Makes me think of Kill Sticky [0], a small Javascript thing that attempts to remove all sticky headers on a page. But really, any sort of thing that blocks, as the Github README says, "annoying, user-hostile software", is a good piece of software in my book. [0] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

OverThere 9y ago
This is pretty sweet. Thanks for sharing.
kuschku 9y ago
Interestingly, this doesn’t kill all sticky headers. In fact, there’s a special CSS position for sticky headers: position: sticky. Which this doesn’t kill.
- tim333 9y ago
  I made an extention doing the same thing and added an == 'fixed' || === 'sticky' recently. It's an ongoing battle. I still haven't figured returning google news to a decent look. (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbkoefoepgmeifoglafkomgjbge https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbko...)
  - nickjj 9y ago
    Do you somehow differentiate sticky headers from sidebars? For example my personal site uses a sticky sidebar for primary navigation and if you hide it, you won't be able to browse anything.
    - tim333 9y ago
      No, my thing doesn't differentiate but it does toggle so if you click it again the nav stuff comes back.

aembleton 9y ago

Does anyone have a problem with Medium on Firefox? For me, it doesn't have the top and bottom bars. I've switched uBlock off and this is still the case. Is all of this extra chrome, a Chrome only thing or some A/B testing? I do see the problems on Chrome. https://medium.com/@andrey_cheptsov/making-java-code-easier-to-read-without-changing-it-adeebd5c36de https://medium.com/@andrey_cheptsov/making-java-code-easier-...

jplatte 9y ago
I see them in Firefox, with uBlock installed and active. This problem is easily solved by clicking the reader mode button in the url bar though.

Aardwolf 9y ago

Hacker news is easier to read on mobile than many so called made for mobile sites. It's as if made for mobile means: "abuse the small mobile screen to show as much as possible spammy bars and social network buttons on it and make them even bigger when you zoom in, while hiding actually relevant information that you can see on the desktop version of the site" While IMHO mobile optimized should mean: wrap the text automatically at the width of the screen, in a readable size in portrait mode, don't hide anything that's visible on the desktop site (like dates, user comments, version history, ...), and support zooming in in a sane way Even Wikipedia fails at showing the user comments pages and sane zooming in of pictures (it's always those sticky bars that ruin it)

kuschku 9y ago
One major change HN would need on mobile would be making the click target for actions (up/down vote, reply, etc) larger. Currently I need to zoom in every time to click any of them.
- swiley 9y ago
  No. I'm fine zooming in or trying multiple times, I spend much more time trying to read which becomes harder when more and more of the screen is taken up by things that are not text.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
    They could make the up/down arrows taller, but not wider. This would prevent fat-fingering the wrong vote, and would not take space from text.
  - whostolemyhat 9y ago
    Yes. It's annoying having workarounds for basic site functionality.
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    There are other ways to do this. The arrows could be put to the right of the [-] icon and wider apart.

dudul 9y ago

A possible improvement: automatically remove all the f-ing animated gifs people think they really really must insert in between each paragraph.

onorton 9y ago
This annoys me to no end. I'm reading a (supposedly) serious article. Not a Buzzfeed listicle.
thebaer 9y ago
Love it. If you file a GH issue I'll remember, and add that as an option.
fenwick67 9y ago
https://github.com/krasimir/gifffer https://github.com/krasimir/gifffer may help
kentt 9y ago
Absolutely horrible for readability. Nothing makes me give up on an article faster.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I've written some ... spicy ... emails to The New York Times over this practice. I tend to go to a W3M dump instead.

primitivesuave 9y ago

This is awesome and will hopefully prod the developers at Medium to rethink the design (if your users need a Chrome extension to make your product usable, it's got some immediate problems that deserve a resolution). The sticky nav bars are really just terrible, and sometimes render parts of the page completely unreadable. It's surprising that these problems were not caught during basic usability testing. Thank you OP for fixing them!

edoceo 9y ago
It's not the engineers, it's the managers.

davidgerard 9y ago

Remember the good old days, when Medium prided itself on being beautiful and readable?

bhrgunatha 9y ago
Website readability in general has degraded seriously in recent years. Flat buttons/links that can't be discerned as clickable, low contrast text, the resurgence of mystery meat navigation and plenty more annoyances I don't even remember. Luckily we have better tools these days to combat them. The fact that firefox has a built in reader mode is indicative of how user hostile web readability is these days.
CM30 9y ago
Yep. That seems to be a trend with user content driven sites. They start off promising a clean, minimalistic look (like Medium, Imgur, Reddit, etc) and then gradually end up cluttering their site with more and more useless trinkets. Indeed, it's so bad for image sharing sites that they seem to get replaced every year or two when the last one starts becoming more and more hostile towards their users' experience.
- irq-1 9y ago
  "Brands" generally follow the same pattern: grow the base, then cheapen the products to increase profits. Eventually the Brand will be replaced with the next big thing, or the Brand will survive long enough to provide a consistent product that people accept.
shopkins 9y ago
Man, those were the days. Though I guess it's managed to keep them at the top, perched on top of people who still think it's The Best Place to Host Your Content™
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  Wondering if the Medium faithful realise the lack of respect Medium has for their writing when you're not logged in [0]. [0] https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/1142179/large_419d82d232ff2cd5e0f8155396bd7dc2.png https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/1142179/large_419d82d2...

christophilus 9y ago

I use Firefox in reader mode. Works like a charm. Firefox mobile also has this feature which has become indispensable for me.

cJ0th 9y ago
I'said it before, I'll say it again: ctrl+alt+r However, while it is lovely when it does work, it crashes my browser rather often.

thinkMOAR 9y ago

(in my humble opinion) they should just as much look at the content they publish as how they publish it. The amount of clickbait quality articles on medium is sky rocket high.

softinio 9y ago

Funny thing is I avoid reading hackernoon blogs because of the green banner hurting my eyes. Not trying to be funny but I genuinely find it uncomfortable. So interesting that in the README file of this project hackernoon is shown as the example lol

gnicholas 9y ago
Yeah, and as a contributor I have been surprised to see that they are now injecting (neon green) advertising banners into some of my articles. I don't mind it at the bottom, but I don't love it at the top.
tedmiston 9y ago
You save any Medium article to Instapaper and read a readable version with your readability settings. That's what I'm doing now for stuff more than a few minutes long.

ynak 9y ago

A bit off topic, but why does Medium add random numbers and chars at the end of their URLs like the example below[0]? That's annoying and distracting when referring from other platforms. Is that a git hash or something? If so, can I check revise history of the article? [0] https://medium.com/@soleoshao/how-i-used-docker-for-latex-on-mac-os-yosemite-cd29c0713cad https://medium.com/@soleoshao/how-i-used-docker-for-latex-on...

MattBearman 9y ago
The hash at the end of the URL is actually the article ID, the part before that is just for SEO/readability, and has no affect on loading the article. e.g.: omitting the article title from the URL still works (https://medium.com/@soleoshao/cd29c0713cad https://medium.com/@soleoshao/cd29c0713cad) as does changing it to something else entirely (https://medium.com/@soleoshao/i-like-turtles-cd29c0713cad https://medium.com/@soleoshao/i-like-turtles-cd29c0713cad) Both those URLs still load the article in question.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tedmiston 9y ago
The other random numbers they used to add after the article ID were for tracking purposes but it seems like they recently backed off on those.

pmlnr 9y ago

Firefox -> URL bar -> click ::book icon:: -> read. EDIT. Huh. No astral plane unicode allowed in HN comments.

Rjevski 9y ago

It's really sad to see Medium turning into this. I used to like Medium, now I avoid any site that uses them (which is getting harder as they now allow custom domains).

userbinator 9y ago

It's amazing how many sites, Medium included, become so much more readable just by turning off CSS and JavaScript. Sure, they look far more bland and become less interactive, but I came for the content and not the author's idea of "design".

WalterSear 9y ago
Contemporary design is overly focused on curb appeal. IMHO, it's an understated problem. IMHO, the cause is a combination of commercialism and of visual designers being inculcated with inappropriate values and training from traditional print design.
- ashark 9y ago
  > IMHO, the cause is a combination of commercialism and of visual designers being inculcated with inappropriate values and training from traditional print design. I judge that it got a lot worse around the time the print-trained designers started to be pushed out of decision-making positions by the digital-trained ones.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. Web design hasn't gone downhill over time - it's definitely improving, simply because the tools have allowed it do so. Perhaps you could provide some examples from the era of print designers and the era after them? What I have observed has been that, while technology has allowed screens to become a more expressive design medium, visual designers tend to be content to cargo-cult techniques from the static, vastly simpler, and more expansive medium of print, and it shows.
    - ashark 9y ago
      I think we probably disagree about what good design is. I think that precisely > static, vastly simpler is the right way to go. This is mere consistency on my part. I hated (most) Flash sites back in the day, and wasteful giant images, et c. I hate (most) JS/CSS cycle-burner sites and giant wasteful images today. Consistency is good. Shit not moving around on my screen is good. Controls working the usual way is good. Consistency, predictability, and clarity are good UX. The basic 2-or-3-column layout with a thin header was fine, with maybe some tweaks for smaller screens these days. Early-period web's allergy to non-content large media files was good. Design mostly gets in the way, while making everything more expensive. I think its function was described perfectly by someone the last time we had a design thread: it's peacock feathers. Keeping up with design trends is harmful to function, but signals wealth (=stability, reliability, social proof of value) precisely because it's so costly and pointless. This doesn't mean it improves my experience on the Web.

cabalamat 9y ago

I use Kill Sticky for this: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

JoshMnem 9y ago

I'm waiting for "Show HN: How to blog with a static site generator". Medium is getting to be too much. If you're a programmer, at least use a static site generator (Metalsmith, Hugo, Hexo, etc.). You can deploy to Github pages with git or via drag-and-drop to a service like Netlify.

namuol 9y ago

Dear web designers: Tall screen? Use a topbar. Wide screen? Use a sidebar.

dredmorbius 9y ago
I'd actually strongly encourage using a non-fixed set of bottom navigation in most instances. I'm increasingly finding sidebars ... bad.

kentt 9y ago

I use Just Read[1] for things like this. It attempts to pull out the relevant text and put it in a user editable style sheet (the default is fine for many). [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpmmkibanfdgjocnabmcaclkmod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpm...

gkya 9y ago

What are the alternatives to Medium?

CM30 9y ago
Static website generators and GitHub pages, WordPress.com, Blogger, typical hosting sites. I think some forums and Reddit style link aggregators have places for longform content too. I was considering my own direct alternative to the site, but at the moment I have other things to work on.
- gkya 9y ago
  AFAIK Medium's selling point is the network, i.e. the easy access to potential followers. My website is static via org-publish, but nobody knows it and if I wanted to popularise it I'd have to do many things. With these networks+hosting services like Medium and Tumblr all you have to do is put some tags. I was asking for this sort of alternatives.
  - CM30 9y ago
    Then I'll say that I'm working on something similar, it's just not ready at the moment. I'm retooling my gaming site into a gaming alternative to Medium and the likes, and will hopefully launch a general version for all subjects at a later date.
dredmorbius 9y ago
My short list would be a self-hosted blog (static site), Reddit (what I'm actually using), Wordpress. Github has some blogging options that I've been meaning to look at, and might also be an option. I've been looking for a better solution, and Medium have pretty much elected themselves out of consideration with their recent directions, styling and otherwise. No confidence.
shopkins 9y ago
OP mentions a similar platform he made, Write.as, in the README. It doesn't do as much as Medium (I think that's on purpose) but they have a small Medium-like network for authors there [0]. I've been on it for over a year [1] and really enjoying the simplicity myself. [0] https://read.write.as https://read.write.as [1] https://shopkins.writeas.com https://shopkins.writeas.com

odammit 9y ago

One of my favorite things about Medium posts is the completely irrelevant hi res image that they nag you to add. Definitely contributes to the story. Clap clap clap.

asdffdsa321 9y ago

Thought this was referring to the decline of its content at first

ghostly_s 9y ago

I for one am shocked, shocked, that independent publishers colluded with a single company in establishing a near-monopoly in hosted content delivery because of their "publisher-friendly policies" and said company is now taking advantage of that position.

aloukissas 9y ago

Stop. Using. "Make X Y/Great Again". Headlines. Thanks, Pretty much everybody

blackrose 9y ago
The formula works! If it can get that guy in the White House, it can sell anything. Also, I think it's kind of delicious when a variant like this is used to actually describe a previously "Y/Great" thing (Medium was readable at some point). Kinda hijacks the meaning from the original phrase and makes it less shitty.

_asummers 9y ago

Does this kill the share on highlight crap? If so, you have another install.

romuloab42 9y ago
It does work surprisingly well without Javascript, so you might want to try that. Not sure if the linked extension would work without JS, though.
Myztiq 9y ago
I had the same problem. Found this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/medium-highlight-off/lfhbdbplpphacepapppdobnenkfimagn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/medium-highlight-o...

_pmf_ 9y ago

Basically every online newspaper is much, much worse than Medium. I don't get all the whining.

kristerv 9y ago

thank you...

talles 9y ago

It's me getting old and grumpy or was it really better back in the days of Greasemonkey?

santa_boy 9y ago

Thank you. Just FYI ... I use the [Mercury Reader Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/oknpjjbmpnndlpmnhmekjpocelpnlfdi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/okn...) which works fantastic! An added benefit, is its ability to send the article to my Kindle to read later at leisure.

edwinyzh 9y ago

Is there anything like this for Gmail? The two large sticky bars (the bar where the search box is on, and the toolbar bar) are wasting too much of my screen estate. Thanks in advance.