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Comment by DarkCrusader2 | Hacker News Reader

I avoid medium posts as much as possible. Everyone is an expert on there with very strong opinions telling me how every technology older than 2 years and not written in javascript is obsolete/dead/not the right way/new <insert a dead technology>.

And what's with the UI on their publications. They take up top 25% of the screen with the branding and navbar and bottom 10% asking me to sign in and both sticks on the screen. Who approved that?

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Firefox reading view could have been invented for Medium! It doesn't make the articles any better though.

Personally I will keep using REST. If I ever find something is too CPU or network hungry with http/JSON I will take a look at a binary protocol.

For me REST has opened up the world of web applications to simple integrations. It is what makes simple, single use case web apps useful.

Exactly. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Why can't they both be suitable for different use cases.

I have another opinion about that. Read as much medium posts aspossible, but keep a critical mind. Medium is nothing but a blog platform, not a science platform, not a news paper. Medium is important, because it makes it easy for everyone to post her/his mindset or agenda. No one has to agree with anyones opinion. But its important to know about those opinions, because it makes it easier to have a dialog.

>"And what's with the UI on their publications"

Agreed, its a content platform with a where the content fights for attention with the medium.com branding. How many people do you really "never miss a story from"? I generally avoid medium.com for this reason alone.

I'm further puzzled when I see companies using medium for their company blog as well. All I can figure is it must be recommended in some user guide to "growth hacking."

I use the stylish add-on for Firefox and remove the bars.

https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?search_terms=medium.com

Thanks for this - Stylish add-on for chrome also works nicely too!

alternatively, use a bookmarklet to remove floating div... name the such as '1. rm float'

then, it's only alt-B -> 1 away, in Firefox

Medium posters borrow clout from medium which makes their post have clout. If you think of medium posters as just bloggers with their own domain or blogspot, you'll see them differently.

Who are these people who think that writing on Medium gives you clout?

Isn't it just a content container? I mean, saying "I avoid medium" sounds like saying "I avoid wordpress" or "I avoid blogspot", speaking of content quality and not look&feel. About this one, I'm logged in, so I have to suppose your % (25% and 10%) don't apply to the logged-in case, also because as soon as I scroll down, all those frills disappears and there's only the text.

It's a content container. A content container that for some of us is now stereotyped as "content in here is often low-quality", which means that in the vast amount of content on offer each day we're more likely to skip links leading to medium.com. If people regularly spread bad blogspot links around, blogspot would have the same reputation. (I'm sure there is tons of spam on blogspot, but when people share blogspot links in my circles they usually are blogs by people that have been at it for ages and care more about content than appearances, so for me blogspot is a high-quality signal)

Being in a known content container is great if you don't have your own "brand" and as long as people associate the container with good content. If they don't, or if your content is way above average, it pulls you down (which provides motivation for below-average writers to write on them, hiding in the crowd, and motivation for good writers to leave)

It is a centralized content container, which makes click-bait titles like this one better material. So you can create a controversial opinion on a subject, get views, make it an entertaining even if exaggerate read and it gets featured among other pieces especially if you use the right popular tags, then your post is on people's medium app and newsletter subscription.

WordPress, on the other hand, is open source software you can host it yourself and thus you can't just slap some tags on it and get featured on top of a newsletter. This is also why some authors prefer medium, easy to setup and easier to get an audience, but then you have to resort to these marketing techniques to drive your views up.

Disclaimer: I have written some medium posts with catchy/controversial titles to test said techniques, call me part of the problem.

I use the "Make Medium Readable Again" extension for when I _am_ interested in the content.

https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA

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