10 ms·

Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close t

by kuhhk 8y ago

Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?

FPGAhacker 8y ago
I feel that way about most bloggish sites, until I hit the readability button. If they block that then I give up.
- avian 8y ago
  Funny how these things go in circles. I remember the time where many webpages were unstyled, letting you freely choose the font, size, colors, etc. in browser preferences. But that was considered ugly and non-user friendly. Now with various readability buttons we're just moving back to that.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Without custom CSS, you couldn't, however, fix the single most important readability issue about unstyled HTML: add reasonable margins and keep body width at the recommended 60–70em or so. Readability modes finally get that right.
    - avian 8y ago
      Right. I forgot to mention that we also used to be able to resize the browser to the width we personally found comfortable for reading. I guess that's something reader modes still have to rediscover.
      - Sharlin 8y ago
        Sure. But lines running from window border to window border are still hard to read. The margins have to be clean negative space.
- worble 8y ago
  Every single time I see a medium link, I prime my cursor to hit Reader Mode as fast as possible, it's a godsend.
  - severine 8y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19035256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19035256
- severine 8y ago
  You can open links directly in reader view with the Open In Reader View addon for Firefox/Chrome/Opera: https://add0n.com/reader-view.html https://add0n.com/reader-view.html It's great for these situations.
  - bhrgunatha 8y ago
    No need for an extension. Reader view doesn't always work though (at least in Firefox.) You can use the icon in the URL bar or CTRL + ALT + R to open reader view. Firefox does some detective work to choose whether to show the reader view icon but using the keyboard shortcut used to work regardless. Recently it seems even the keyboard shortcut doesn't work unless the icon is visible - I think becausethe heuristic for showing the icon is more accurate these days.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pornel 8y ago
Same here. It's ironic that Medium was supposed to be a nice, clean reading experience — an alternative to all the crappy popup-ridden content mills.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
I have to block js from medium in order to get scrolling to work, so yeah. All the fucking popups and cutesy nags are a bit rich too.
dhh2106 8y ago
I feel similarly about Medium: waning enthusiasm. I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to. I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising policy.
- headmelted 8y ago
  I'm with medium, but I didn't start there until they allowed for you to use your own domain. If I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose (much) Google-juice. Not ideal, and not a perfect escape plan, but better than leaving all my eggs in one pretentious basket.
  - kobiguru 8y ago
    > f I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose Didn't they block it? I read a post here about it some time back. I doubt medium would make you leave it easy.
- mrzool 8y ago
  > The UI isn't beautiful. I disagree. HN's UI is perfect.
  - dhh2106 8y ago
    Perfect and beautiful are two different things. 100% agree that HN's UI is great, but I'm not sure anyone would look at it and say, "oh that's gorgeous." Or at least I wouldn't After all, the purpose of UI is not to be beautiful, but too many people still think it is
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    They could have fixed the overflowing fixed-width blocks on mobile, to be honest :) But I agree with you in every sense.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Same. When they first started, I was excited. Now they just seem scummy. If there's an article that I really really want to read, I put the url into outline.
thefz 8y ago
While some interesting and insightful articles still exist on the site, the majority feels like someone trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Yeah, TEDx Talks in text format
  - jtloong 8y ago
    Wow this is the perfect analogy.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    TEDx Talks have more words in them and better visuals too.
    - dabockster 8y ago
      Still the same theme, though. Leads you through a story then either issues a call to action or tries to sell you something. The whole thing is built to affect you enough emotionally to perform whatever action the author wants.
- headmelted 8y ago
  I've noticed this myself. Also, of late it increasingly feels like I'm reading the Op-ed section of the NYT or the Guardian. I'm all for opinions on current affairs (I have loads!) but it's not what I came here to read, nor is it what your title suggested.
- peruvian 8y ago
  Or to sell themselves. Or worse, writing a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence".
  - tonystubblebine 8y ago
renholder 8y ago
>Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. Likewise. The last Medium link I clicked was, more or less, just a complaint "article", which cited no data and didn't proffer anything beyond common, every-day knowledge. In other words, it added nothing of substantive value. What I had hoped would be a new avenue for information dissemintation and discussion provocation seems to have, subsequently, turned into an avenue for echo-chamber circle-jerking. No, thank you. In all honesty, I can simply go to the common subs on reddit, if I wanted that and cuppa tea to go along with it.
antocv 8y ago
Has medium not yet changed their domain to "pardontheinterrupt.com" ?
SamWhited 8y ago
Every time I click through to a post I want to read on Medium it gives me that damn full page popup about not being logged in (I know, I'm just reading a post, why would I want or need an account for that?) and then I generally just close the page and don't read whatever it was. Not to mention that they don't advertise RSS feeds so you have to jump through hoops to use it for a feed reader.
- fatbird 8y ago
  Most big media sites now have "you read X free articles this month, you need a subscription to continue" popups. Medium doesn't require you to sign up to continue, but it acts and reads just like those in its cutesy way, hoping the user infers the requirement to sign up. That popup is a UX dark pattern, and for me puts them in the same category as LinkedIn with its various means of lulling you into actions you wouldn't consciously take.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  The feeds that are there don't work well. For most blogs/pages/people, there's no way to get a feed but one that includes not only the stories by that account, but any comment they left anywhere on the site too, as well as all the comments on their stories.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  That's probably because I'm blocking some script, but I get a top menu that covers the top 20% of my screen, and an advertise (visual one) for their RSS feeds that covers the bottom 30% of my screen. None of them can be closed without some extension or the developer tools.
m-p-3 8y ago
The popup asking you to sign in everytime I'm logged out is do incredibly annoying that I just send the page to Pocket or Outline if I think I might read it later.
- mamurphy 8y ago
  I've never had a Medium account and don't want one. I stopped reading Medium articles because of the annoying popup begging me to "make this relationship more serious" or whatever and get an account.
raddledsplash 8y ago
Same, I just saved it to instapaper and read it there.
CM30 8y ago
Nah, you're not the only one. The various modals and 'log in' prompts are obnoxious, and it's only made worse by how 90% of promoted Medium.com articles are paid now (so there's a good chance you'll see a 'pay to continue reading' warning instead of any content). And that's before you even get into the content, which is usually either: 1. Pointless bullshit from some 'influencer' no one cares about filled with silly buzzwords 2. Political panicking about Trump 3. Or generally uninteresting articles in general. Medium's long since gone through its Eternal September phase, so there's no real quality difference between the stuff there and the stuff anywhere else.
pmontra 8y ago
The first thing I do when I load a Medium hosted page on my phone is to use uBlock origin to hide the app button and the fixed top bar. If I couldn't do it anymore, I'll stop reading those pages.
lmm 8y ago
It's still the nicest, simplest web design I know that has any level of popularity for blogging. I'd still rather read on Medium than on Wordpress or Discourse or Blogger or Ghost or really any popular blog layout I've seen. I don't want to trivialize how annoying the login popups are, but ultimately I put up with them for the sake of a more readable article on the other side. What blog styles do you like reading?
- dwaltrip 8y ago
  The UI/UX for medium comments is so utterly horrible it makes me angry just thinking about it. I was reading some interesting articles the other idea, and it was a painful, torturous struggle to read all of the comments and their nested responses. The entire text of a comment should not be a clickable link! And you shouldn't have to go to a new page to read comment replies... Sorry, just venting, not directed at you.
  - lmm 8y ago
    Deeply nested discussions get harder, much like on StackOverflow. I think it's a deliberate design decision and I'm not convinced it's a bad one; you do miss out on some deeper discussion, but it encourages people to work-up their responses into full-sized posts (and making a new post is very easy).
    - dwaltrip 8y ago
      Fair enough, I get that it is non-trivial to design UI for nested discussions. I'm most annoyed by the entire comment being a clickable link that takes you off of the page (and the scroll position being lost when you click "back"). I've accidentally clicked on a comment numerous times. I then have to click the back button, scroll down to the comments section, click "show all comments", and then search for the comment I was reading, just to simply to get back to where I was. It is a quite bad user experience when it happens.
PaulHoule 8y ago
To me it looked like a scam right away. Medium tried to act as if it were something a little bit better than the rest of the web and it quickly became something just a little bit worse. Why? If you are running a tiny service you can get together a community of people who are two or three standard deviations better than the mean. If that service grows, it is going to tap a wider pool of lesser talent and the quality of the discussion will decay. Hacker News has fought this, but Hacker News is not funded the same way as the firms that Y Co invests in.
- AJ007 8y ago
  Be suspect of any centralized, closed service attempting to replace an open, working, eco-system of decentralized platforms.
  - balladeer 8y ago
    To be honest that's the biggest reason I have never really rooted for Signal. Even though it's like really beta, I would rather invest my hope and efforts in Matrix/Riot kind of setup.
MisterOctober 8y ago
Totally. The UI is positively atrocious -- especially for posting stuff, but also for viewing -- and the overall quality of content has taken a serious nosedive. Most of the Medium links I've clicked in the past six months have ended up being been regurgitated swill, or else simply claptrap. I was a paid Medium member for a good while, but discontinued my membership late last year for those reasons.
amelius 8y ago
> Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Keep in mind that Medium is just YouTube, except with text-based content.
nhebb 8y ago
Same. The header and footer give me visual claustrophobia. If the article is something I really want to read, I right-click on each and do Inspect > Delete.
antibland 8y ago
Agreed. I quarantine Medium links inside a Firefox multi-account container like the entertaining contagion it's become.
runxel 8y ago
Oh I still remember the dawn of Medium: What a revelation this thing was! A wonderful platform, made for the reader! Nice typography, good layout, easy but pleasant on the eyes. Oh what does Medium have become... Meanwhile it became the villain in the game. (The Batman quote would really place itself nicely here)
balladeer 8y ago
I have always liked blogs hosted on their own. Different fonts, different background, font size/colours, different layouts et cetera. It feels very personal. Medium felt like an assembly line. It's very bland.
ako 8y ago
No, i read most articles through Pocket. Just save the link to pocket, and read it popup and adfree in the pocket app.
- bjnord 8y ago
  I use Pocket also, but: For most web sites, Pocket makes a text-only copy that you can read offline without hitting the website again. But Pocket doesn't do that for Medium articles; it will only take you to medium.com to see the original (or offer to view it with the Medium app), so either way you have the login requirement, 3-article limit, etc. I suspect that Pocket and Medium have some kind of agreement; Medium may have stepped in to say "you can't make that text-only offline copy; that's our content" and Pocket, not wanting to get sued, went with the linked strategy instead.
  - ako 8y ago
    That probably means i haven't read anything from medium recently. Wasn't aware of it.
geniium 8y ago
Exactly the same feeling. Few year back, really like what they built and had fun using their tool. Since ˜1 year, I have no pleasure to use it and I tend to get away from it.
dabockster 8y ago
I stopped reading Medium after hearing that a guy I know was never paid for the articles he wrote for them back in 2014. I took a look again in 2017 after being out of college for a few months and it looked like a bunch of college sophomores trying to one up each other on how long they've been programming, going to hackathons, contributing to OSS, etc. So toxic. Shameless plug for warisboring.com. Go support my friend's work. If anyone at Medium sees this, just pay him already.
FrankDixon 8y ago
totally, I love most of the articles I‘ve read. But all the garbage medium needs to run. Really heavy pageload for a simple thing like blogging
mattlondon 8y ago
+1 - if I am reading hackernews and see a link that is from medium I will skip it. 99% if the time it will be some thinly-vieled marketing. I am sure there is a lot of perfectly good content on there, but the bullshit marketing crap has turned me off of the whole domain. It is basically as bad as seeing a wordpress link, except you can guarantee that 99 times out of 100 it will be someone peddling their startup (at least wordpress had some slightly out-of-left-field stuff on it) There is nothing wrong with self-hosted blogs. If you still want to "blog" then go for it on your own domain, please don't feel like you have to publish through some random third party that exists to monetise your content.
b123400 8y ago
It's especially bad on mobile. On my iPhone SE, the top is a banner promoting their native app, then a top navigation bar and their logo. The bottom is an ad for the paid membership, a dialog for Do Not Track info. The tiny space that's visible behind all these craps is.... the irrelevant hero image. I can't even read the title!

by kuhhk 8y ago

FPGAhacker 8y ago

I feel that way about most bloggish sites, until I hit the readability button. If they block that then I give up.

avian 8y ago
Funny how these things go in circles. I remember the time where many webpages were unstyled, letting you freely choose the font, size, colors, etc. in browser preferences. But that was considered ugly and non-user friendly. Now with various readability buttons we're just moving back to that.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Without custom CSS, you couldn't, however, fix the single most important readability issue about unstyled HTML: add reasonable margins and keep body width at the recommended 60–70em or so. Readability modes finally get that right.
  - avian 8y ago
    Right. I forgot to mention that we also used to be able to resize the browser to the width we personally found comfortable for reading. I guess that's something reader modes still have to rediscover.
    - Sharlin 8y ago
      Sure. But lines running from window border to window border are still hard to read. The margins have to be clean negative space.
worble 8y ago
Every single time I see a medium link, I prime my cursor to hit Reader Mode as fast as possible, it's a godsend.
- severine 8y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19035256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19035256
severine 8y ago
You can open links directly in reader view with the Open In Reader View addon for Firefox/Chrome/Opera: https://add0n.com/reader-view.html https://add0n.com/reader-view.html It's great for these situations.
- bhrgunatha 8y ago
  No need for an extension. Reader view doesn't always work though (at least in Firefox.) You can use the icon in the URL bar or CTRL + ALT + R to open reader view. Firefox does some detective work to choose whether to show the reader view icon but using the keyboard shortcut used to work regardless. Recently it seems even the keyboard shortcut doesn't work unless the icon is visible - I think becausethe heuristic for showing the icon is more accurate these days.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pornel 8y ago

Same here. It's ironic that Medium was supposed to be a nice, clean reading experience — an alternative to all the crappy popup-ridden content mills.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

I have to block js from medium in order to get scrolling to work, so yeah. All the fucking popups and cutesy nags are a bit rich too.

dhh2106 8y ago

I feel similarly about Medium: waning enthusiasm. I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to. I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising policy.

headmelted 8y ago
I'm with medium, but I didn't start there until they allowed for you to use your own domain. If I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose (much) Google-juice. Not ideal, and not a perfect escape plan, but better than leaving all my eggs in one pretentious basket.
- kobiguru 8y ago
  > f I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose Didn't they block it? I read a post here about it some time back. I doubt medium would make you leave it easy.
mrzool 8y ago
> The UI isn't beautiful. I disagree. HN's UI is perfect.
- dhh2106 8y ago
  Perfect and beautiful are two different things. 100% agree that HN's UI is great, but I'm not sure anyone would look at it and say, "oh that's gorgeous." Or at least I wouldn't After all, the purpose of UI is not to be beautiful, but too many people still think it is
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  They could have fixed the overflowing fixed-width blocks on mobile, to be honest :) But I agree with you in every sense.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Same. When they first started, I was excited. Now they just seem scummy. If there's an article that I really really want to read, I put the url into outline.

thefz 8y ago

While some interesting and insightful articles still exist on the site, the majority feels like someone trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning.

raverbashing 8y ago
Yeah, TEDx Talks in text format
- jtloong 8y ago
  Wow this is the perfect analogy.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  TEDx Talks have more words in them and better visuals too.
  - dabockster 8y ago
    Still the same theme, though. Leads you through a story then either issues a call to action or tries to sell you something. The whole thing is built to affect you enough emotionally to perform whatever action the author wants.
headmelted 8y ago
I've noticed this myself. Also, of late it increasingly feels like I'm reading the Op-ed section of the NYT or the Guardian. I'm all for opinions on current affairs (I have loads!) but it's not what I came here to read, nor is it what your title suggested.
peruvian 8y ago
Or to sell themselves. Or worse, writing a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence".
- tonystubblebine 8y ago

renholder 8y ago

>Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. Likewise. The last Medium link I clicked was, more or less, just a complaint "article", which cited no data and didn't proffer anything beyond common, every-day knowledge. In other words, it added nothing of substantive value. What I had hoped would be a new avenue for information dissemintation and discussion provocation seems to have, subsequently, turned into an avenue for echo-chamber circle-jerking. No, thank you. In all honesty, I can simply go to the common subs on reddit, if I wanted that and cuppa tea to go along with it.

antocv 8y ago

Has medium not yet changed their domain to "pardontheinterrupt.com" ?

SamWhited 8y ago

Every time I click through to a post I want to read on Medium it gives me that damn full page popup about not being logged in (I know, I'm just reading a post, why would I want or need an account for that?) and then I generally just close the page and don't read whatever it was. Not to mention that they don't advertise RSS feeds so you have to jump through hoops to use it for a feed reader.

fatbird 8y ago
Most big media sites now have "you read X free articles this month, you need a subscription to continue" popups. Medium doesn't require you to sign up to continue, but it acts and reads just like those in its cutesy way, hoping the user infers the requirement to sign up. That popup is a UX dark pattern, and for me puts them in the same category as LinkedIn with its various means of lulling you into actions you wouldn't consciously take.
jrochkind1 8y ago
The feeds that are there don't work well. For most blogs/pages/people, there's no way to get a feed but one that includes not only the stories by that account, but any comment they left anywhere on the site too, as well as all the comments on their stories.
marcosdumay 8y ago
That's probably because I'm blocking some script, but I get a top menu that covers the top 20% of my screen, and an advertise (visual one) for their RSS feeds that covers the bottom 30% of my screen. None of them can be closed without some extension or the developer tools.

m-p-3 8y ago

The popup asking you to sign in everytime I'm logged out is do incredibly annoying that I just send the page to Pocket or Outline if I think I might read it later.

mamurphy 8y ago
I've never had a Medium account and don't want one. I stopped reading Medium articles because of the annoying popup begging me to "make this relationship more serious" or whatever and get an account.

raddledsplash 8y ago

Same, I just saved it to instapaper and read it there.

CM30 8y ago

Nah, you're not the only one. The various modals and 'log in' prompts are obnoxious, and it's only made worse by how 90% of promoted Medium.com articles are paid now (so there's a good chance you'll see a 'pay to continue reading' warning instead of any content). And that's before you even get into the content, which is usually either: 1. Pointless bullshit from some 'influencer' no one cares about filled with silly buzzwords 2. Political panicking about Trump 3. Or generally uninteresting articles in general. Medium's long since gone through its Eternal September phase, so there's no real quality difference between the stuff there and the stuff anywhere else.

pmontra 8y ago

The first thing I do when I load a Medium hosted page on my phone is to use uBlock origin to hide the app button and the fixed top bar. If I couldn't do it anymore, I'll stop reading those pages.

lmm 8y ago

It's still the nicest, simplest web design I know that has any level of popularity for blogging. I'd still rather read on Medium than on Wordpress or Discourse or Blogger or Ghost or really any popular blog layout I've seen. I don't want to trivialize how annoying the login popups are, but ultimately I put up with them for the sake of a more readable article on the other side. What blog styles do you like reading?

dwaltrip 8y ago
The UI/UX for medium comments is so utterly horrible it makes me angry just thinking about it. I was reading some interesting articles the other idea, and it was a painful, torturous struggle to read all of the comments and their nested responses. The entire text of a comment should not be a clickable link! And you shouldn't have to go to a new page to read comment replies... Sorry, just venting, not directed at you.
- lmm 8y ago
  Deeply nested discussions get harder, much like on StackOverflow. I think it's a deliberate design decision and I'm not convinced it's a bad one; you do miss out on some deeper discussion, but it encourages people to work-up their responses into full-sized posts (and making a new post is very easy).
  - dwaltrip 8y ago
    Fair enough, I get that it is non-trivial to design UI for nested discussions. I'm most annoyed by the entire comment being a clickable link that takes you off of the page (and the scroll position being lost when you click "back"). I've accidentally clicked on a comment numerous times. I then have to click the back button, scroll down to the comments section, click "show all comments", and then search for the comment I was reading, just to simply to get back to where I was. It is a quite bad user experience when it happens.

PaulHoule 8y ago

To me it looked like a scam right away. Medium tried to act as if it were something a little bit better than the rest of the web and it quickly became something just a little bit worse. Why? If you are running a tiny service you can get together a community of people who are two or three standard deviations better than the mean. If that service grows, it is going to tap a wider pool of lesser talent and the quality of the discussion will decay. Hacker News has fought this, but Hacker News is not funded the same way as the firms that Y Co invests in.

AJ007 8y ago
Be suspect of any centralized, closed service attempting to replace an open, working, eco-system of decentralized platforms.
- balladeer 8y ago
  To be honest that's the biggest reason I have never really rooted for Signal. Even though it's like really beta, I would rather invest my hope and efforts in Matrix/Riot kind of setup.

MisterOctober 8y ago

Totally. The UI is positively atrocious -- especially for posting stuff, but also for viewing -- and the overall quality of content has taken a serious nosedive. Most of the Medium links I've clicked in the past six months have ended up being been regurgitated swill, or else simply claptrap. I was a paid Medium member for a good while, but discontinued my membership late last year for those reasons.

amelius 8y ago

> Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Keep in mind that Medium is just YouTube, except with text-based content.

nhebb 8y ago

Same. The header and footer give me visual claustrophobia. If the article is something I really want to read, I right-click on each and do Inspect > Delete.

antibland 8y ago

Agreed. I quarantine Medium links inside a Firefox multi-account container like the entertaining contagion it's become.

runxel 8y ago

Oh I still remember the dawn of Medium: What a revelation this thing was! A wonderful platform, made for the reader! Nice typography, good layout, easy but pleasant on the eyes. Oh what does Medium have become... Meanwhile it became the villain in the game. (The Batman quote would really place itself nicely here)

balladeer 8y ago

I have always liked blogs hosted on their own. Different fonts, different background, font size/colours, different layouts et cetera. It feels very personal. Medium felt like an assembly line. It's very bland.

ako 8y ago

No, i read most articles through Pocket. Just save the link to pocket, and read it popup and adfree in the pocket app.

bjnord 8y ago
I use Pocket also, but: For most web sites, Pocket makes a text-only copy that you can read offline without hitting the website again. But Pocket doesn't do that for Medium articles; it will only take you to medium.com to see the original (or offer to view it with the Medium app), so either way you have the login requirement, 3-article limit, etc. I suspect that Pocket and Medium have some kind of agreement; Medium may have stepped in to say "you can't make that text-only offline copy; that's our content" and Pocket, not wanting to get sued, went with the linked strategy instead.
- ako 8y ago
  That probably means i haven't read anything from medium recently. Wasn't aware of it.

geniium 8y ago

Exactly the same feeling. Few year back, really like what they built and had fun using their tool. Since ˜1 year, I have no pleasure to use it and I tend to get away from it.

dabockster 8y ago

I stopped reading Medium after hearing that a guy I know was never paid for the articles he wrote for them back in 2014. I took a look again in 2017 after being out of college for a few months and it looked like a bunch of college sophomores trying to one up each other on how long they've been programming, going to hackathons, contributing to OSS, etc. So toxic. Shameless plug for warisboring.com. Go support my friend's work. If anyone at Medium sees this, just pay him already.

FrankDixon 8y ago

totally, I love most of the articles I‘ve read. But all the garbage medium needs to run. Really heavy pageload for a simple thing like blogging

mattlondon 8y ago

+1 - if I am reading hackernews and see a link that is from medium I will skip it. 99% if the time it will be some thinly-vieled marketing. I am sure there is a lot of perfectly good content on there, but the bullshit marketing crap has turned me off of the whole domain. It is basically as bad as seeing a wordpress link, except you can guarantee that 99 times out of 100 it will be someone peddling their startup (at least wordpress had some slightly out-of-left-field stuff on it) There is nothing wrong with self-hosted blogs. If you still want to "blog" then go for it on your own domain, please don't feel like you have to publish through some random third party that exists to monetise your content.

b123400 8y ago

It's especially bad on mobile. On my iPhone SE, the top is a banner promoting their native app, then a top navigation bar and their logo. The bottom is an ad for the paid membership, a dialog for Do Not Track info. The tiny space that's visible behind all these craps is.... the irrelevant hero image. I can't even read the title!