Hacker News Reader

Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

It's behind a sign in wall for me because I've read too many medium articles, apparently.

Bring back blogspot!

Here is a link to the original. I posted on Medium because it seems more people will visit Medium than a blog they've never heard of before.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/how-i-made-8000-per-month-po...

I wish it weren't so.

Among the Hacker News crowd the sentiment is going the other way.

Interesting BTW The listener in the Vatican is probably Robert Ballecer

Medium is a catastrophe, obviously, but where it does have stuff you want or need to read, just install one of the many cookie-deleting browser extensions. I'm a simpleton so just manually hit a 'delete cookies from this site' button, but there are fancier options that will routinely delete cookies from specified domains, etc.

I haven't yet found a freemium site that either this or turning off javascript doesn't work for.

I share your frustration, particularly with Medium (and a true sense of dismay at those who choose to publish their effort on Medium's platform).

TFA was great, and I'm motivated to pursue my podcast idea (not for money, but because I think it would be interesting). But I just don't get why people put their creative content on Medium. Does it actually add value (bring more readers?) Seems to me it will discourage some potential readers; what's the offset there?

If I understand correctly Medium charges both readers and publishers for a service that you can get free elsewhere? Does that sum it up?

Let’s say the service is to get the audience to the content... and it’s not a very simple problem to solve.

HN does it very well, btw.

I only find Medium articles linked from elsewhere or via search. In both cases having those articles hosted on another platform or on private blogs would work.

What I don't do, which is where Medium might add value is go on Medium to search for content. I don't reckon I'd find good stuff by going down that route.

So really they are piggy backing off search and links that would otherwise go to "free" blogging software, or at least something like Ghost that isn't in your face and actually hosts just the content.

In short they are a parasite.

https://outline.com/J6Du4y

Outline is awesome for as long as it works. It's only a matter of time before it is effectively blocked by the content capturing sites.

I know it's a bit of a rant, but we shouldn't need Outline to make the web useful. Thankfully it exists as an option, but that's like needing antibiotics because every time we go shopping we get cut 1,000 times by the doorways to the stores we try to shop at...

It's already starting to fail on some of the major sites. Recently it's stopped working on the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and a couple of others that I can't remember offhand.

Interestingly, the blocking seems to be on the Outline end, because the site says "We're sorry, but this URL is not supported by Outline" if you try to use it on an article from one of those sites (example: https://outline.com/WytaqY). The message when scraping a page fails is "We're sorry. This page failed to Outline."

So it's not that the sites themselves have figured out how to block it, but they seem to have gotten Outline to specifically exclude them.

Reader mode is available in Safari and can't be disabled like that.

There is a little 'x' button in the top right of that sign in wall modal

https://imgur.com/a/hqFq5zj

It was a different one than usual. No x-button.

Was trying to let the guy know a lot of people wouldn't have been able to read it, not moaning about the usual "let's make it official" popup.

Go Incognito and try again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com