One day, my grand parents told me a secret to access Medium without hassle.

I can't tell you in details since it's a secret but it really works, believe me. It's incredible. It has something to do with herbs, mindfulness and blocking JavaScript. Medium is so great when you do that.

On Android, IceCat Mobile blocks non free JavaScript and on Medium, it's a feature beyond the expectations.

I would call this graceful enhancement, or progressive degradation.

You start with a sane and nice baseline, and then add crap to that for supported browsers and configurations.

It’s a shame, used to read so much on medium but now I just read the hackernews comments.

Opening medium in midori will flash the content on the screen and then half a second later replace it with a giant full page “500 error” message.

Which is strange because that’s usually a server side problem. If the content made it then it should be a 200 anyway, so if some other asset has a problem they just kill the whole page using client side scripts?

Opening it in elinks fixes the problem of course.

I have uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger installed on Firefox, and I can just click anywhere outside that window to see the full article. Not sure it's to do with the browser extensions necessarily, but I don't have a particularly exotic setup.

The only other thing I have which might help is a user chrome file - https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html - which has this simple rule in it:

  html, body { overflow-y: visible !important; }

That seems to help with a lot of the basic "disable scrolling" css rules that sites use.