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> To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in. How can someone write this sentence and not even try to address the obvious follow-up question: Why?
by tobr 5y ago
> To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in.
How can someone write this sentence and not even try to address the obvious follow-up question: Why?
I can imagine a few reasons, and none of them makes me want to do what Medium is asking me to do, ”free” or not.
- eloisius 5y agoAlso annoyed. Turning a freaking blog platform into a walled garden is an absolute farce. What value exactly does Medium add over WordPress? It's trendy and newer? Has a more "minimal" design? The gimmicky inline comments? I've added Archive.is' Firefox addon and my default is to read Medium (and many other sites) as archives. I really wish that search engines would start indexing these sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like that.
- zo1 5y agoI avoid medium by default these days. Problem is more and more of these pay walled sites are "oddly" starting to appear near the top of search results. Even though that same data or news exists on non pay walled sites/blogs. TowardsDataScience is another one. I know it's not the same but the rise of "Axios" feels just as artificial or pushed. Like all of a sudden it popped up and everyone is "what do you mean you've never heard of them, they're a top news organization." Yet the first time I heard of them was watching an interview they did where the journalist was interviewing a major politician whilst holding a look of absolute disgust on their face.
- fallingknife 5y agoThey cut the article by 86% to be in line with others!
- Freak_NL 5y agoYou can only use your new Boulangism toaster with approved, compatible groceries. Please hold your Boulangism approved food item in front of the Boulangism toaster to let it scan it. Your Boulangism toaster will open when it recognizes compatible food from producers from its partner program. Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized Bread.
- AussieWog93 5y agoHis story isn't that crazy; something similar happened in real life with Juicero. DRM on chopped fruit!
- Freak_NL 5y agoNo it is indeed an excellent and very believable story (although taken to the extreme). The general moral of that story doesn't jive the notion of having to get a free app to continue reading a blog article, even if a web browser suffices from a technical standpoint; so I cheekily referenced it in that context. Juicero definitely sounds like the inspiration for Doctorow's novella.
- imron 5y ago> Why? Because you’re not using an add blocker.
- ruuda 5y agoThere was also no such popup with Javascript disabled
- mrtksn 5y agoI wonder how would your position change if they put another option that says "read in browser for 1$" and what it does, is to immediately pop up the 1 step payment confirmation and unlocks the article once you complete the payment(which itself could be 1 step with faceID or touchID on Apple devices). This rant is the default reaction on for any article that is not presented frictionlessly and for free. There must be a metric in the analytics for it :) Let's call it bounce/rant ratio. Over 1.0 it means that people don't care enough about your article, if it's under 1.0 it means that people can take even more in order to read it.
- Nextgrid 5y agoAn account doesn't net them $1 though, and $1 is also a lot of money to risk considering Medium hosts a lot of garbage. If the button represented the true income they earn from someone creating a throwaway account then I'd be happy as it would be in the range of a few cents.
- mrtksn 5y agoIt's free market. I also don't see how we are entitled to get it for free or get it in our own terms(I want it for free and I want it without creating an account and I want it it he browser). If the offer is not good, just bounce. The entitlement for for free stuff on the internet is amusing, what I actually wonder is if it is a millennial thing to believe that we deserve it for free or at the perceived inartistic value of our own. My observations are that the older generations and the newer generations have no problem with understanding the concept of paying for content(with money, data or access to you for an upsell later). The early internet has spoiled us when everything was made for the glory and later in 2000s free again but paid by VCs during the gold rush and land grab.
- turminal 5y ago> It's free market. That's a very ironic thing to say given what the post was about.
- vinay_ys 5y agoI closed that window within 5 seconds.
- johndunne 5y agoSpot on... I was just about to write about the very same point, and delighted to see it's the top response here... Paywalls, paywall, paywalls, please. Line up, line up.
- brnt 5y agoHere in the Netherlands this is now the standard for everything. What started as a cheaper than supplying a fob 2 factor, ended up naturally with locking up all info in apps. That, and Whatsapp being the only method of communication offered.
- Kim_Bruning 5y agoI encountered "whatsapp is the only option" exactly once; and stopped doing business with that company. (Whatsapp is not any sort of standard,and I definitely don't support it :-P ) Do you have any examples of other companies?
- Freak_NL 5y agoI think I've seen it once or twice now. One is a small local burger side-gig here in Leeuwarden (limited in the sense that they only work/deliver on Friday's) which seems to exclusively work through Instagram and WhatsApp. I can't order from them because of this, but they are unique in this regard. But then again, their target demographic seem to be younger people who wish to buy not just burgers but also a photographable experience (at least, that is what I make of the pink hamburger buns and general vibe). Tangentially related: one of those nasty new grocery delivery apps — this one is called 'Crisp' — only works with an Android or IOS app (which is weird, because it is just an online shop for groceries, and it is usually much easier to just set up a website for an online shop, so they are definitely in the game of manipulating their customers to the extreme based on purchase patterns and other trackable behaviour). All in all, nothing major yet. But yes, very annoying.
- zihotki 5y agoThat could also be explained by pure economy. It's too costly to support many communication channels so they just focus on the ones that brings more money. And Whatsup is one of major chat platforms in Netherlands due to historical reasons.
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
- commoner 5y agoBypass Paywalls Clean lets you read Medium articles without installing the app or logging in: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean Also works on mobile, if you use Android.
- bencollier49 5y agoAs emphasised by Freak_NL, it seems particularly ironic that this is Cory Doctorow behind the paywall. What I don't understand is why when I'm searching for technical articles, Google ranks Medium at the top of results. Doesn't this fall into the whole "one result for the spider and another for the user" trap to get marked down? It's a blight on the web.
- turminal 5y agoMedium is in direct conflict with some of the things Doctorow fought for over the years. It's sad to see him using it.
- EMM_386 5y agohttps://archive.is/AQ32r https://archive.is/AQ32r It's my go-to for Medium, almost always already archived and ready to read. I haven't found a way to effectively get around it with either uBlock Origin or Bypass Paywalls extensions installed.
- AlfeG 5y agoI always open links to Medium in incognito mode. This helps.