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Medium is so chock full of anti-features this doesn't surprise me at all. I often find myself hunting for an archive link to read some article because I'm past
by errantspark 6y ago
Medium is so chock full of anti-features this doesn't surprise me at all. I often find myself hunting for an archive link to read some article because I'm past my free article limit. It's absurd that I have to sign up for Medium to read some random blogger's article.
I miss the days where it felt like software was trying to make my life easier, nowadays my experience is mostly characterized by a constant struggle to avoid being taken advantage of.
- lazyload 6y agofwiw opening the article in an incognito tab usually does the trick to get past the article limits. That said, you're right on the money about how badly it sometimes seems that medium doesn't want me to ever use their service
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- an_opabinia 6y agoWouldn’t you agree that it’s really valuable to know if people actually read the article, how far and which parts?
- austinheap 6y agoNo.
- flemhans 6y agoAre you kidding? No of course not. You as a reader would rather prefer that the publisher doesn’t spy on you. Would you feel comfortable reading a newspaper whilst the editor looked over your shoulder all the time ? You might want to do that as a paid testing panel but not voluntarily. If you wrote an article, and you’re mediocre or spammy, of course you’d get off on such metrics to please yourself, to get validation. Good writers would not care as much.
- hkai 6y agoIt's like saying that as a McDonald's customer, you'd prefer they did not charge you for food and you could just get it for free, without having to follow the rules. In fact, McDonald's has a lot of anti features: having to wait in line, greasy food, having to pay for the food and inability to bring outside food and drinks. Businesses need to earn money and knowing their customers is part of this.
- tingol 6y agoIt's not like that at all.
- luckylion 6y agoIt would be like that if McDonald's started to put surveillance systems into their bags to learn about how you consume their burgers and fries once you've walked out of the restaurant. Knowing your customer is important. Knowing everything about your customer is intrusive.
- vertex-four 6y ago“Knowing your customer” is not equivalent to performing surveillance on your customers. People knew their customer for centuries before we could tell that a random unwitting user spent 1.6 minutes on the page and exactly where they put their mouse cursor while they were on it.
- aloukissas 6y agoNo
- jimmyswimmy 6y agoNo. I'll take an opposing viewpoint. It's not "really" valuable, it's marginally valuable. If your articles aren't yahoo-style clickbait, anything you'd do with that data would just make your future articles less authentic. Alternatively, is your collection and utilization of that information worth invading the privacy of your readers? The printed version of The Economist continues to deliver a fantastic product yet they have no idea how far into each article (or even the entire magazine) I get each week. They simply publish detailed, excellent articles which draw me back, week after week. Why should online articles be any different? An incisive author who has put in the effort to prepare a good, thoughtful article knows it is so before publishing. Or one can publish thoughtless, banal articles and collect lots of statistics on how long it takes your readers to figure out that the article is a waste of their time. Distinguishing between the two is precisely what we were taught throughout grade school.
- saaaaaam 6y agoYou have absolutely nailed it. The cruft medium provides and calls insight is only valuable to people who want to work out how trick their audience into reading further in articles where they deliver no value.
- mrweasel 6y agoAn interesting note on The Economist is that their digital and print verions are priced the same, despite the higher cost of printing and delivering the printed version. The ads in the print version is simply worth more compared to the digital version. I’m still not convinced that online ad tech adds nearly as much value as the tracking industry wants us to think. Sure, it’s useful to know if you reader can afford the product wish to promote, but The Economist actually knows roughly what you income is, based on your shipping adress alone, while geo-location online still consistantly place me in the most expensive city in Denmark, but I live in an area where income is average at best.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoNot at all. Why would that be valuable to me as a reader?
- ssss11 6y agoDo whats best for the user. Does the user want that? No.
- saaaaaam 6y agoOne of the things I do is run a small B2B publishing company. We turn over a modest six figure dollar amount each year with a tiny tiny team. We are recognised as one of the leaders in our niche. The thing that matters to us is whether we create great content, not whether someone stopped reading at 54% of the way through a particular article. Our audience appreciates that our content is authentic, informed and honest. And I don’t mean “authentic” like social media types mean when they say things like “always strive to be authentic!” When you start telling editorial staff to write differently because the stats say something about one particular article you are in a race to the bottom. Medium is an awful platform that rewards badly written click bait targeting stupid people. It’s a blight on the face of the web.
- ssss11 6y agoYou are the product. We need to change that business model.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- city41 6y agoI find opening Medium in an incognito window gets past the wall. Are they now plugging that loophole?
- danvayn 6y agohttps://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome If you use Chrome or Firefox this link might be useful for you.
- lordofgibbons 6y agoThis plugin injects Google tracking if you're using Chrome: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/452e2c9932fa528bd3096b28bd9022cf96438f1a/src/js/background.js#L431 https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/45...
- dependenttypes 6y agoI would argue that the anti-feature is the existence of local storage. Medium is just a symptom of the underlying issue, which is that browsers do not care about privacy.
- siscia 6y agoI am about to implement a privacy friendly base knowledge app, and local storage is a cornerstone for doing fast full text search.
- 411111111111111 6y agoErm, how should ppl keep Frontend authentication tokens etc between refreshes without something like local storage? And how would we make offline webapps which don't store anything on servers?
- dependenttypes 6y ago> Frontend authentication tokens etc Cookies or use tls authentication. > And how would we make offline webapps which don't store anything on servers? Don't make webapps in the first place.
- Jonnax 6y agoYeah let's download desktop apps! They all have permission to upload your entire documents folder to the internet.
- dependenttypes 6y ago> They all have permission to upload your entire documents folder to the internet They do not need to, and unlike "webapps" there isn't a remote server that can change the code that you are running at any moment.
- gruez 6y ago
- zerop 6y agoI find that medium is even moving articles behind paywall even without consent from author. It was not happening earlier. For example - Look at Netflix Medium blog https://medium.com/@NetflixTechBlog https://medium.com/@NetflixTechBlog There are few stories which are behind paywall. Do you think Netflix would have marked them explicitly behind paywall to earn money from blog?
- kevsim 6y agoLast I checked the Medium paywall is opt-out on each post you make. Quite easy to accidentally leave it checked.
- type0 6y agointeresting, so medium is becoming another silo. I knew they were user hostile web actor but their recent moves are horrible. Let's take this for a spin. Even if you cross post, then if someone tries to read it on medium first and encounters paywall, closes it, then finds your article on your blog and consciously or subconsciously this reader would already have a negative emotions about it and could easily loose patience before reading your whole post. Have you gained anything? no, you have potentially lost a long time reader.
- kevsim 6y agoI’m currently cross posting medium and hashnode but you’ve got a point there. Maybe time to say goodbye to medium. I’m not using their distribution/paywall anyway so all medium is to me is a really nice editor.
- ybbond 6y agoI use Medium (also dev.to) only to cross post my weblogs. I make sure to uncheck the option that may make my post exclusive in the future, and I also put canonical link[1]. The main goal is both SEO, and options for readers. If they prefer reading on Medium app or RSS or Dev.to than in my blog, so be it! [1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033930293-Set-a-canonical-link https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033930293-Set-a...
- ergwwrt 6y agoIs there a chrome extension that auto opens medium articles in archive view after clicking link?
- SllX 6y ago> I often find myself hunting for an archive link to read some article because I'm past my free article limit. It's absurd that I have to sign up for Medium to read some random blogger's article. Once upon a time I would have done the same (or written a script), but I’m past the point of putting in extra effort to read “some random blogger’s article”. If a random blogger/writer/whatever wants me or anyone else for that matter to read what they wrote, posting it on Medium is absurd. If it’s good enough to stick your name on it, and it’s important enough for you to write it, own the work you put into it, put it somewhere that people can read it without jumping through hoops or dealing with Medium’s BS. It’s a crappy site. All Medium needed to do was take words that look like this: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ And turn it into this: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ And you know, RSS feeds and maybe some image hosting, or custom domains and some other premium shit. Like these guys did: https://www.blogger.com/ https://www.blogger.com/ https://wordpress.com/ https://wordpress.com/ https://www.typepad.com/ https://www.typepad.com/ Every one of these old-time blog platforms are still around, all of them offer/offered different things, all of them take some words you spit out and throw a fancy template around them and if none of that satisfies you, there’s as many static site generators and “blog engines” as there is porn, and like porn, you can always produce and personalize your own.
- amadeuspagel 6y agoAnd yet medium is more successful then "these guys".
- aahortwwy 6y agoWordpress powers about a third of the web and Automattic has a significantly higher valuation than Medium. Maybe Medium's cooler, but it's not more successful.
- amadeuspagel 6y agoAutomattic isn't just wordpress. But even if wordpress is more successful, the fact that medium had any success at all, even though wordpress already existed proves that medium did something right.
- austincheney 6y agoThat's a fair position. I don't completely agree, but I certainly empathize. It could also be said of multiple perspectives related to software from employment, coworkers, user experience, data, social engagement, and so forth. It seems there is a tremendous amount of potential exploitation for undisclosed motives.
- SebastianKra 6y agoA while ago, I realized that I could just block all cookies for Medium. Now I always have 2 free articles. ;) Let's see how long it lasts.
- m4lvin 6y agoOne of the first addons I install everywhere: https://makemediumreadable.com/ https://makemediumreadable.com/
- Jugurtha 6y ago>I often find myself hunting for an archive link to read some article because I'm past my free article limit. It's absurd that I have to sign up for Medium to read some random blogger's article. Have you tried deleting the site's cookies and refreshing? Clicking on the lock in the address bar > Cookies > Remove.