A browser extension to make Medium more readable | Hacker News Reader

A browser extension to make Medium more readable

makemediumreadable.com

168 pointsexolymph153 comments

Remember when blogging systems allowed you to choose a theme? Or that running your own site allowed you to make the site without ads, nag bars, etc? Yeah, maybe, but just maybe, when the next medium comes along with the promise of saving the web, just stick to having your own site, where you're in control.

I know this extension is to read, not to write, but if most writers just have used, say, Hugo, we'd not be here.

We can only hope it goes the same way as posterous did.

Pepperidge farm remembers

Please put more substance in your comments.

It comes down to chrome not supporting various css styles per site [1]. Other browsers have a menu option to load alternative styles if a site provides them.

[1] https://www.thesitewizard.com/css/switch-alternate-css-style...

sorry, what? you can just include the <style> on the server side, where you render the page. Or do what I did, <style media="none"> and turn it on with a js click, store the value in cookie/localstorage for which <style> needs to be on.

I also don't really understand how this connects to the topic.

That creates the same functionality for one page but leaves the end-user unaware of the general duality of content and style. Choosing a style from a browser menu is not perfect but it is a hint for the end-user to see that each and every page can be rendered differently quite easily. Without that knowledge, end-users take the given layout as an unchangeable necessity and don't expect several styles for their blogging system or a page without a nag bar.

Ah. I wasn't referring to end user choices, I was talking about publisher design choices.

Medium.com is a platform, where your control is negligable. Earlier hosts, such as blogger, allowed you to theme your blog, you magazine, just like a completely owned site would.

My comment has nothing to do with end user, or in-browser themeing.

It's a shame that almost every decent website (this one being a notable exception) eventually succumbs to the temptation to go to war with their users on behalf of their advertisers. Radio stations and podcasts are doing it too by upping the percent of the *cast dedicated to ads in hopes of generating more revenue.

This never ends well, especially since so many cord-cutters are less tolerant of ads than people have ever been before.

Oh well. It's a nice opportunity for disruption, and the cycle repeats.

Youtubers too. Filler unboxing video with no real content still gets a pre and post roll ad. (On top of whatever ads YouTube inserts). What’s even better is the tech youtubers that do a paid review and still include their normal ads.

To be fair, ads got way less profitable for Youtubers recently. After the so-called "Adpocalypse", it's a total crapshoot whether any given video will be monetizable, so it makes sense that videomakers would resort to adding more paid-by-the-sponsor ads directly into the video rather than relying on revenue from Yoututbe's own ads.

I'd argue that in many cases, the users go to war first. Ad blockers, paywall bypassing, incognito mode, etc. make it virtually impossible for most sites to survive on a straight ad model. The company has to find a way to survive, so it tries memberships, click-bait, nag screens, gathering user data, and in response an extension like this is built, and it keeps going back and forth with anti-ad-blocker, anti-anti-ad-blocker, etc. Medium is far from blameless here, their Twitter feed is repetitive and far too low on quality articles vs junk. And yes, their nag screen and 3-article limit suck. But they need to do something, don't you think?

If you are a user of ad blockers and additional strategies, what do you envision as the endgame? No ads, ever? What kind of content are you expecting at that point?

Not really. AdBlockers were a reaction against the toxic ads. And even today only a minority of users (<10%) are using adblockers.

You should provide sources when you toss out statistics, PurpleRamen is not itself a source people trust. You are quoting a global number. And it's outdated.

In the US, overall ad-blocking is 30%+. https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

On laptops, US adblocking was 40% in 2017. https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-...

These number are growing every year. And surely, if you focused only on the demographic group most likely to read Medium, the percentage would be even higher.

> The company has to find a way to survive

No it doesn't. Closing the business when they can't turn a profit is a perfectly viable (maybe inevitable) course of action. When a local restaurant is losing money do you expect them to close or to start padding the meals with sawdust? Much of digital media has reached the point of charging you for the sauce on your sawdust.

> What kind of content are you expecting at that point?

Much better content on average, less clickbait crap. You could halve the quantity tomorrow and no one would notice.

If restaurants offered meals for free, people wouldn't complain about the ads on the menu. No restaurant offers free meals though.

Should we start charging for everything we see online?

So content providers shutting down their businesses will result in "much better content"? Are you sure you've thought this through?

Whomever starts it, it always turns into an arms race because the backers of the website want constant growth; they are never content with steady performance.

So be it. I have better things to do with my time than participate in 100 arms races. Such sites simply become dead to me and I move to the next one that's friendlier to its readers.

In many cases, the reason they need constant growth is because they're not profitable. They're just burning through cash in an attempt to become profitable in the future, which requires growth.

The endgame is for sites to provide content that users want to pay for.

If you would ban ads on the internet, only sites actually being useful to users would remain. The rest would die off, along with the ad industry on the internet. Sounds like a dream to me.

Nobody pays for content. Let's stop pretending it's a usable business model. Even paywalls are hated by most, and banned by some communities.

If you block ads, they'll simply make the content an ad.

A) They are going to make the content an ad anyway. It's not like they are going to turn down one advertising revenue stream just because their old one came back.

B) Tons of people pay for content. It's a perfectly viable business model. Look at Patreon, Kickstarter, etc. The uncomfortable truth for website owners is that they are likely just not putting out material that is worth paying for.

In terms of news, there likely is no such thing. The WSJ is among the most respected and high-quality newspapers on Earth. Despite that, every time a WSJ article is posted on HN, somebody posts a paywall workaround. If HN won't pay for content, you expect the average joe will? Get real.

This is just a sample from this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17510315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17490839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17479284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17480087

> In terms of news, there likely is no such thing.

Most countries have public broadcasters like the BBC that are much higher quality than most of the commercial options. We're already paying for news.

I think it's the nature of advertising. Ideally the relationship between audience, producer, and advertiser would be symbiotic but it almost always ends up being parasitic. I think the incentives are just don't align. I've been running a tracking blocker (which is effectively an ad blocker) for years and feel absolutely no guilt for doing so.

In Safari you can ask it to load certain websites with reader view automatically. If you do so, Safari will change to reader view as soon as it can render the page.

This how I deal with the annoying stuff in Medium.

This is a nice feature!

Edit: for those wondering, visit a website and long press the reader button on the left side of the address bar to enable.

Firefox on mobile does this too. Can't live without it on my phone.

Really? How do you do this? I continuously switch to reader mode for a few sites I read regularly, I would love to make this switch automatic.

It doesn't AFAIK.

> This how I deal with the annoying stuff in Medium.

I deal with it by avoiding medium. Seriously, why support them in any way with page views/whatever if you disagree with their presentation method?

I would be interested in moving on from Medium but haven't found a serviceable alternative. Do you have any recommendations?

A self hosted ghost based blog?

Hand written HTML with FTP upload. Any static generator with rsync + ssh. Github pages. Ghost, Known, Kirby, WordPress....

There's a plethora of options.

Neocities and a static site generator? Github pages?

Static Wordpress. Seriously. WP has the biggest selection of themes, and being static practically removes all common security-related hurdles. Other static generators would come second first. Then Ghost, which aims to be the blogging platform that WP used to be.

I second Ghost for that use case, I'm using it for years already for my personal blog (not very active: https://blog.notmyhostna.me) and it's getting better all the time without getting bloated so far. I never really got started with static site generators as it's just too much overhead for me.

If you don't want to self host it and be even closer to the hands off approach of Medium you can just buy the hosted version.

Svbtle.

A few dollars a month, and it’s like having your own Medium without the bullshit.

Other alternatives like Ghost or Hugh are good but require a bit of install/maintenance work so they’re not for everyone.

Blogger is still around. So is Wordpress. So is Github pages. Blog hosting is a dime a dozen. If you want a Medium-like layout, you can probably get 95% of it with a couple dozen lines of CSS.

I don't follow regularly anything except the HN homepage. However there are many blogs with their own domain that are actually Medium and they get linked to HN every now and then. I wonder if that extension is smart enough to process them too. I use uBlock to hide the Open in App button and the sticky bar, in case the same site will get linked again.

> In Safari you can ask it to load certain websites with reader view automatically.

That is nice. Firefox has an extension called "Open in Reader View" that adds an item to the context menu for links. But one still has to use it explicitly. (AFAIK, at least.)

Medium, is now full of clickbaitish articles + content marketing from various people pandering their online courses. Way different from the medium, I fell into when I discovered it. Recently deleted the mobile app.

Medium golden age was 2015-2016. Then it started transforming to clickbait-y, ugly garbage.

My experience: personal blogs (github.io/whatever) has the most amount of insights, 'a-ha moments', usefull info.

I just use a bookmarked script which I came across on some thread here.

javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

I have bookmarked it and whenever there is an annoying pop-up or long headers and footers just run the script. Very useful for these kinds of websites.

For those who don't know how to use the above script: Bookmark this page -> go to all bookmarks and replace bookmark address/url with above script. Click on this bookmark with medium website open and you will see all the crap go away.

> Open in App

To all sites that do this(I'm looking at you, Reddit), no, I do not want to install yet another app just to continue reading. The web is already designed for reading. You hear that?

I honestly don't understand why sites do this. Can someone explain it to me?

Better information on the users, you can harvest their actual location, phone number, contacts, email etc...

Instead of being restricted to a browser, you are on their device, with whatever access you want.

Because if they can get an app on your device, they can push messages at you easier. Track your usage of the app, assign it a unique ID etc.

The app will auto-update, so as new features/tracking/things are desired, they can push these out to devices.

Basically, they get more control of the end user.

You can push updates out to a web app even easier: deploy them. Boom, suddenly your user sees changes next time they visit.

your "boom, suddenly your user sees changes" is dependant on "next time they visit". A push notification will alert the user to new content quicker.

Analytics. They can get a boatload of data from the app that can't be obtained through the browser.

Websites are sandboxed and make it much harder to gather data about your users (To sell them ads).

Apps have much wider permissions off the bat and can request more as necessary.

I'd assume (though I have no data to back it up) that your service would get used more if the user has an app downloaded as the barrier to access your service is much lower

If they get you using an app that evades in-browser ad, tracking blockers etc... so $$ is the primary reason, basically

To gather more details about you from your phone. It's about data and eye balls. You will get more and notifications to increase user engagement.

Surveillance capitalism. https://plus.google.com/+GregLinden/posts/TWiGesiztbj

(I'm not sure exactly if this is the present motivation. But it's the motivation for a lot of apps. Data can be sold / used for ads when collected in very large numbers, and apps collect more data than websites. So there are strong business incentives to move to an app, for many sites.)

An app is sort of like a physical object, like a flyer. It reminds you of them. The place on iOS or Android's home screen has this effect. It's kind of similar to how Windows apps added themselves to the Start Menu, the desktop, and the taskbar.

2 things -- Tracking and Ads.

Using the web version of the product is disadvantageous from the developer's POV as it gives a lot of control to the user over what personal data of his can be shared. Web browser extensions also allow the users to block ads and other annoying content -- this is sub-optimal for the company as it trims their ad revenue, and as a result, potential future advertisers.

It's all about controlling what the user sees based on data collected from tracking, imo.

I’d think a user that has browser extensions is the type of user that is very unlikely to get the app.

This. Data collected from apps is far more reliable than that collected from web visits. There is lots of extensions that block/spoof data collection. Moreover, fraud on ads placed on websites is much higher than that placed within apps.

Ads and tracking as others have said, but also push notifications. People accept push notifications without thinking.

They (e.g. reddit the company) want you to do more than read. They want you to subscribe and follow and user-generate content (and not block ads.)

They build an app because apps.

Then they compare behavior between app and website.

And there's a stupid, stupid analytics datapoint that shows "Users of the app browse/subscribe/follow/post 2x more!"

That only happens because the only people willing to download and use the app are the power users. But they just worked hard creating an app, and nobody questions analytics data that tells them their hard work was worthwhile.

So now, armed with their supporting data, they begin pushing people to the app because they think it will lead to more pageviews/subscribes/follows/posts and eyeballs on ads.

Exactly this

In addition to this they can get solid data on engagement times, app usage, where uses spend time on the page

They can do that with the website, though. Not too hard to read a scroll position in JS, or to warehouse page view records.

Ten replies in ten minutes. Looks like everybody wants to explain this.

Besides everything else, Push Notifications is usually the top reason.

You can do push notifications on the web too.

Not (really) on iOS web.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you cannot (yet) do so on the iOS without a native app. This is why developers ask you to install their native apps.

I'm not sure why, but I always instinctively deny notifications and location-tracking on websites, but always seem to allow them on mobile apps. I don't know if others are the same.

i deny flat across the board. i don't allow location anything unless there's a damn good reason for it. an RSS reader that wants to send me feeds based on my location, nope. an app that needs to accurately show my location on a map, okay, but only while i'm using it. find the location to something closest to me, nope, i'll do that manually. i don't trust anybody is only doing the one thing you think they are when permission is granted. i may be painting with a very broad brush, but too many bad actors have already made me a grouchy old guy

I share the absolutely same behavior. Just because I added your app to my phone doesn’t mean you’ve earned the right to steal my attention any time you want. Increasingly, notifications are becoming more opaque about what action, if any, triggered the notification. “New message from Ann: How’s work?” Becomes “You have messages”. Nothing happening to you directly, let’s notify you anyway: “Bob and Jill added to their stories”, “Sammy logged a run, give her kudos!”. Not using yelp enough? “Check our this new brunch place [that’s paying us to advertise to you]”.

This isn’t adding value to my life. Notifications are an infestation of advertising into every untouched aspect of our personal lives. If I turn them off, I get fewer ads. If I get fewer ads, I’m less inclined to consume and waste money on things I never needed, and save that money for the stuff I care about.

Apps are like TV channels. They are a broadcast medium whose content is entirely controlled by the broadcaster.

Unblockable Ads, In-App microtransactions, Push Notification-based variable reward schedule reengagement dark patterns are the result.

Stickyness, as well as tracking & ads.

Aside from the reasons andre provided, i think the biggest driver is ads. I block ads for most sites, but without a lot of work i can't block ads using the site-specific app.

Although i wonder how many app users only real benefit from the app is a button to launch the site from the home screen, and how many of those users would switch if they were aware of how to add a browser bookmark to their home screen. Anecdotal data, but I have had several friends with this problem, two specifically complaining about the reddit app being less readable than a browser but wanting a single button to press to launch the site.

https://i.reddit.com

Banner text for me reads "TRY REDDIT'S MOBILE WEBSITE". There. is. no. escape.

commenting is horribly broken on mobile.

> The web is already designed for reading.

Not only that, these apps just have an embedded browser inside!

One of the most crucial parts of my reading workflow is opening things in new tabs. (It allows one to explore a topic by BFS rather than DFS.) Asking me "Don't you want to use our app?" is like asking, "Don't you want your browser to only support a single tab?" The answer is no...for all the reasons browser makers discovered in the 1990s.

For the same reason hijacking links to other pages via JS is an abomination that should be cursed and banned. Each time I click a link to open the link a new tab and see about:blank instead the designer should receive a slap on the wrist.

I agree, I'm a BFS guy, too (I like that word, very good description). This behavior is a major PITA. With the introduction of JS frameworks in all kinds of cases (e.g. static blog generators that use react), there's the possibility that the developer messed up the routing or deep linking or even forgot the whole feature because he never opens links in new tabs. I have the presentiment that this will happen a lot in the future.

Even m.facebook.com has this problem in the event overview. There's no way to open nearby events in a new tab because the link only works due to JS hooks.

If you're implementing links with a JS onclick event of some flavor, instead of an <a href="...">, you should be hung up in the street by the toes. There's no excuse for making things more difficult on yourself, in a way that breaks the way things are supposed to work.

To be fair, there are a few single-tab browsers out there, where you then defer tab management e.g. to your window manager on linux: * https://www.uzbl.org/ * https://surf.suckless.org/

Came here to say this. It’s so annoying that I would probably pay for the plugin to get rid of those pop-ups on reddit mobile sites.

To what extent do plugins exist for mobile? My understanding is that on iOS there are Share Extensions and Action Extensions for Safari, but these have to me manually triggered on every page where you want them to run.

On Android, Firefox supports addons (but practically no one knows they exist) and Chrome doesn't have extensions.

Are there other options? I hope I'm wrong here since it would be great to have browser plugins on mobile!

Plugin is probably not the best word. But since iOS supports content blockers, I was imagining it’s possible to have dedicated apps block reddit pop-ups.

Gotcha. Yeah it would seem pretty easy for content blockers to add these banners to their blocking list.

It would be most useful to do this in a dynamic way though. I might actually want to know that examplewebsite.com has an app that I could download. But once I've gone to that site 5 times, then the banner should be hidden. Either I don't want the app, or I've already downloaded it. Unfortunately, I don't think content blockers can include any logic like this.

On Android Firefox, I always install Ublock Origin. It makes web browsable on mobile without killing the machine.

I have varying level of success installing other addons. For example, Tab Count addon works. I can install LastPass on mobile but there is no way to use it as it goes blank on login screen. I assume that, mostly the developers are not aware that the addon may be used on mobile too.

For those who are wondering why I would need a Tab Count extension on Android Firefox, when the tab count exceeds 99, the ui shows an infinity symbol. Yes, I have that many tabs, I had more than 200 tabs open at one point and android firefox kept chugging along like it was nothing. I am trying to reduce the count for my own sanity. Currently, tamed it to a more docile 44.

That and linking rile me to no end. It’s so needlessly user hostile that I might want to share a link to something I find interesting, which is a well-supported and ubiquitously accomplished task in browsers, that completely falls by the wayside in these degeneate apps.

Recently reddit has also started making its official app generate links to posts via the domain "reddit.app.link", instead of normal reddit.com urls. These new links automatically send everyone on mobile to the app store to download the official app, even if they clicked from inside a third-party app.

As far as I can tell, the only way to make the links work on mobile is to install the official app (once you do, they'll open the linked post inside it).

I could never work for a company that wanted me to implement anything like that.

Medium is especially cruel as they offer no way to make it go away.

There must be a Firefox extension to block these, if not, ive got my weekend project!

I want to install this addon, but it asks for permission to view and modify data on all sites.

Both for security and loading javascript on every page I visit reasons, I wish there was a version that only bound to medium.com. I know I could compile one from source but that's a hassle.

agreed

Then it wouldn't work on Medium-powered sites like hackernoon.com. There is an open, up-for-grabs issue to fix that permission [0] if anyone wants to help us solve this!

In the meantime, there isn't anything crazy you have to do to make it only work on medium.com -- just clone the repo to your machine, change this one line to "https://medium.com/*" [1], and then load the extension in your browser.

[0] https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA/issues/15

[1] https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA/blob/master/manifest.json#L2...

is there no way to ask for these permissions after having the plugin installed allready?

I seem to remember that the Reddit enhancement suite does that

That's the feature they want someone to write in that GitHub issue.

The proposed fix is a good idea. Reddit Enhancement Suite uses optional permissions that way[1] and the prompts the first time it wants to act on one of the optional sites are not irritating at all.

[1]https://github.com/honestbleeps/Reddit-Enhancement-Suite/blo...

An alternative is ... to install onlyone extension that tracks allyour activity everywhere (Stylus), and write or apply CSS stylesheets to fix annoyances.

The set I use.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/hFzKwoir...

Firefox's Reader mode also works well. (It's among the targets I've restyled.)

You can also use uBlock to hide parts of a page. It's much easier to use on a phone. Pick the area on screen, possibly select a parent or children in the list on the popup, preview, confirm and it's gone.

Yep, and I do. Multiple modes, defence in depth.

Would Firefox "containers" solve this problem?

I remember maybe 4-5 years ago looking at Medium’s CSS in order to emulate their readability.

Things change.

Firefox users who either dislike the requirement for permission on all sites, or don't want an additional extension: know that you can achieve about the same with a few lines in your userContent.css [1]

  @-moz-document domain(medium.com), domain(backchannel.com), domain(hackernoon.com), domain(mondaynote.com), domain(artplusmarketing.com), domain(codeburst.io), domain(logrocket.com), domain(slack.engineering), regexp("https?://medium\..*") {.js-postShareWidget, .overlay, .overlay--lighter, .postActionsBar, .js-postActionsBar, .metabar, .js-metabar, .postMeterBar, .js-meterBanner, .highlightMenu, .highlightMenu--active, .popover, .js-popover, .popover--dark, .butterBar--privacy, .js-stickyFooter {display: none !important;}}

Obvious gotcha: incomplete list of domains, now you have to add medium domains when you meet them and restart Firefox.

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css

Firefox Reader Mode is the thing that I find makes Medium an enjoyable experience. It's so much nicer than Medium ever was.

They should try that design.

The creator (and maintainers) of Medium ought to crouch in a corner with shame. People (including prominent voices on Twitter and the web) have complained about Medium’s issues for some years. This extension is like one more slap in the face for a platform that started with the premise that:

"There's been less progress toward raising the quality of what's produced." [1]

Quality? Are we going to talk about quality in all its dimensions?

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)#Background

Every time this pops up on my radar, I always consider taking a stab at adding the “make articles with gifs better” feature mentioned in the github issue, but I always end up too busy with other work. I’ll carve out some time this weekend to give it a shot. My workload stars are aligned for some open source, and that would be a great feature!

I use the Unobstruct ios app to dedickbar medium. Works quite well.

https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing-unobstruct-230e4e95cf5...

I use Unobstruct on iOS too and would love an equivalent in my browser. Does anyone know one? (uBlockOrigin-usable blocklist or extension)

I don't know if the mobile version of uBlock Origin has it, but there's an eye dropper button if you click the uBlock button on the toolbar. You can use that to build block rules automagically. It reminds me of the API spies people used to make for Visual Basic 6.

Thanks; I know how to make these rules and I have a few, but there's a lot of them (lots of medium domains, and lots of non-medium ones that also deserve the same treatment (de-dickbar-ification), both of them constantly changing) so I'm looking for something assembled & maintained by a community.

I'll get in touch with EasyList folks (there's already a CookieMonster list to get rid of EU cookie clutter, an Unobstruct one would be similar or both could be merged) and the author of Unobstruct.

Unobstruct is awesome!

On the desktop, Unstick for Firefox gives you a little nuke icon that gets rid of any dickbars anywhere you happen to find them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unstickall/

That, plus uBlock Origin's "right click, block element" feature for things I visit regularly, gives me a significantly better Internet experience than I'd otherwise be stuck having.

Thank you so much for this. I loathe the pardon the interruption window.

I've put together a Chrome extension that does the same thing, but it requires no permissions and works on all other similar sites as well: Kill-Sticky adds a keyboard shortcut (Alt+K or Cmd+K) that removes all sticky content, and re-enables scrolling.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-sticky/lekjlg...

I just have a bookmarklet that removes any sticky elements.

I've been doing something similar for years, though the implementation method has changed some as my preferred browser and the set of available extensions has shifted. I want to browse the web with a white-list approach to which pages are allowed to display elements that are anchored to screen coordinates rather than scrolling with the page. Generally speaking, the only pages that should be permitted to pin an element in front of the main content are web apps, but most of the pages I visit are (or should be) purely document-oriented.

Why just Medium? Make all articles readable (along with other features) with Just Read: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpm...

Full disclosure, I'm the developer of Just Read.

Just Read is great, and I would be using it a lot more if I wasn't a Firefox guy. Great work, though!

I haven't used the Medium app on my Android device for some weeks now. Today I got a notification about some article and swiped it away. Then later I got another and realized: Wait, I don't normally get Medium notifications!

Not sure what changed but it was a nice reminder to delete the app.

Also, I was unaware that people found Medium to be a suboptimal reading experience.

I miss the old medium, with it's "Collections" that allowed me to read (and post) articles in specific interest areas.

Somehow the nature of the content back then was much more engaging too. It was as raw as seeing a new band perform for the first time in some dive bar. Now it is just a sanitised pool of sophisticated marketing brochures masquerading as articles.

Why not just use the "reader" mode of the browser? (at least in Firefox this works quite well)

If you use Safari there is no need for an app or extension.

Just right click (macOS) / long press (iOS) on the "Reader" symbol and activate "Use Reader Automatically on 'medium.com'". Same procedure for any branded domain that uses Medium.

FF also has a "Reader Mode" (F9), though it gets rid of all images.

Can it make Medium not ask me to pay for a subscription after N (3 at this time) articles?

In what ways could Medium have financial income without transferring the wealth from us?

Asking its publishers to pay? Like WordPress or Ghost does.

Opening in incognito is usually good enough to bypass Medium's paywall.

Shh. Lest they fix that bug.

Does anyone else have issues with images on medium being slow to load, always fuzzy and then taking ages to actually render? Seems like a constant problem for my part of the world.

Change browser user agent general.useragent.override.medium.com to Opera/9.80 (Android; Opera Mini/20.1.2254/37.9178; U; en) Presto/2.12.423 Version/12.16

Question:

Would adblockers and mods this extension still work when ad networks and sites like these embrace webassembly?

Would it not be a crime to "reverse engineer" their code?

Still haven't got Medium to log me in properly. Keep getting signed out, I assume it's because I block third party cookies...

When I want a readable Medium, I simply toggle the Firefox's built-in Reader View(Ctrl+Alt+R). It's readable enough for me.

Using Brave browser is how I tackle this.. With it you can selectively disable Javascript, ads, etc on any or all sites you visit.

I think it's interesting that the author bought a domain just for this extension

What "should" authors be using instead of medium?

Literally any other blogging platform

> A browser extension to make Medium less annoying.

So this just blanks out the articles or what?

This gave me a good laugh. In my domain (healthcare), the articles on Medium are rubbish.

They're not all that great in the software field, either. 75% of them are just content marketing.

I went one step further and made myself an FF extension to blank out any links to Medium (and other useless sites) from any page. I forget they exist until I come across one of the countless posts complaining about the suck. Or I realise the reason images and other content arent showing is because it's a custom domain hosted by medium, then they get added to the list.

Remember when Medium was supposed to be the height of readability?

Yes, this is highly ironic.

Was it ever?

I only ever knew it as a showcase of ui&ux anti patterns / dark patterns.

I've always despised Medium.

> Read and change all your data on the websites you visit

Better luck next time.

You can build it from source if you would like. It needs to do that because some (most) medium posts are not on the medium.com domain.

https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA

What's with everyone using the "Make X Great Again" phrase?

I take it you're not from North America?

They are mocking Trump

Yeah, it’s too bad about the name because this extension otherwise seems really good. (Just a minor annoyance, but as you say, one that comes up constantly…)

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