It's amazing how unpleasant most media sites are to read. Medium may still be better than most, but, like Gruber points out, they've been heading down a bad "growth hacking" path lately.

What really blows my mind is how awful so many websites from old publications with high-quality print editions are. A lot of these publications had quality standards for advertisers, and they worked hard to design nice-looking print layouts. As a result, even if there were a lot of ads they were at least unobtrusive and often kind of interesting and worth looking at in and of themselves. But it's like publishers are somehow incapable of thinking about a website the same way they think about a magazine.

When I end up on a website that takes fifteen seconds to load, makes text jump around as different ads are displayed and hidden, autoplays video, and pesters me with popups I wonder if anyone who works at the publisher ever actually uses their website. I mean, who, in their right mind, could ever think they were providing an even halfway decent product?

I have absolutely no sympathy when legacy publishers who peddle terrible, low-quality product struggle and go out of business. I mean, I hate to see media power consolidating into Facebook's hands, and it sucks when people lose their jobs, but these publishers have no one to blame but themselves.