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Comment by egdod | Hacker News Reader

> You've completed your member preview for this month, but when you sign up for a free Medium account, you get one more story.

Fuck Medium.

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Incognito gets you around this. I know it's beside the point. However incognito is the laziest of bypasses to a subscription-wall which tells me Medium aren't really behind it as a strategy anyway.

For now.

The real problem is that websites can still even tell whether or not you're in incognito mode.

Lately I've been using Forget Me for Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forget-me-clean-hi... One click wipes cookies, history, and local and session storage for the current site. It works on the NYT and everything else I've tried so far.

Or just deleting the medium cookies (two clicks, same tab, no incognito needed). If there is an easy way to block all cookies from a specific domain without an extension, that would be nice too..

How to do that on android?

uMatrix, can granularly block js, cookies, css etc on a per site and per domain (different elements loading into a site) basis.

Blocking all cookies and javascript on medium has minimal to no negative impact on my experience.

I use uMatrix with a global deny of everything. When going to a site never previously visited uMatrix then puts up a big warning sign indicating that the entire site is blocked. That's handy to increase anti-phishing defense depth too.

I do the same, its annoying for a while, but worth it.

Now I just need a way to sync my settings between browsers, devices, phones and pc. I want one Dark Reader, uBlock, and uMatrix profile across firefox, chrome/brave/vivaldi, and phone.

to reiterate what you said, since others are trying to be helpful and giving other workarounds:

this is besides the point. for such a simple task as publishing static text, we've got what, yet another $7.99 (or whatever), a month fee? yes, medium provides some benefit to both authors and readers, and some may find it worth it, others won't.

But it's static text. www.pacbell.net/~username, or Geocities may not have been so glamorous; capitalism has an odor all its own.

(inb4 I get ad-homonym'd for having personally benefitted from capitalism)

It's $5. All of that money goes to the authors right now (VC is funding the operations). Plus in the case of this article, some additional money went to an editor and copy editor.

Just letting you know I downvoted this because it contributes nothing to the conversation that we haven’t heard a million times before. Yes, Medium sucks ass. I’m sorry. I hate it too. But to see this on every. Single. Thread. involving a Medium article makes me want to pull every last goddamn hair out. The fact that it’s the top comment right now speaks to HN’s apparent inability to actually discuss the content of an article instead of a million other tangential things about the article, the most popular of which being whether or not it’s hosted on Medium.

The venue blocks access. Linking to an inaccessible article will get complaints. That's the appropriate response.

If HN refused medium articles, this problem would solve itself. What value does medium provide to be worth losing HN as a source of traffic?

But it doesn’t, so why bring it up? Just ignore it and move on. I don’t understand why these conversations aren’t considered not germane and deleted, honestly.

Because that response works until you run out of products/services to move on to.

If half the interesting posts on HN are blocking access, it merits conversation and I'd argue a few "fuck off"s as well.

I'm not sorry that we don't delete conversation you consider boring.

Dudes, I'm not sure how to tell you this but if you want quality content without advertising, then spending money will be required at some point.

Edit: I'm rate-limited so I can't answer below. Medium pays authors through the Partner Program which is a Flattr-like interaction-based model.

Does Medium pay the authors?

Yes. Currently 100% of the subscription revenue is shared out to the authors. Obviously, there's some venture capital paying for the rest of operations right now, and the revenue share will change. But yes, in general, the point of the subscription at Medium is to pay authors and editors to get better articles.

We had plenty of good content (more, frankly) a decade or two ago when people just ran their own websites / blogs.

It’s almost like silicon valley mostly makes broken crap.

Broken records, apparently.

I decided to block all medium cookies in Chrome a few weeks ago when that message popped up, and now that you mention it I haven't seen it in a while, so I guess it is enough, no scripts/add-ons required.

To deal with this, I use the YesScript2 plugin, now I can read whatever article I want.

Not sure it's obvious, but that article only exists because of medium's paywall. That subscription money goes to the author, and in the case of that publication, also editors. I can understand why someone might not want to be a medium customer yet, but I don't see how cursing them is warranted.

Early tech bros built the internet on the idea of everything should be free (even if at the same time they idolized billionaire CEOs) and now the idea of free is pervasive and things like journalism, a pillar of democracy is failing.

Exactly. I'm excited for the pendulum to swing back to pay. I don't understand why I'm being downvoted for that. Pay is so obviously better for the consumer, especially a tech consumer. I know not all of us who read HN are making FB salaries, but we all have pretty good earning potential. And so the ROI on paying $5 to read smarter, more curated, more accurate information seems like a no brainer.

I'm excited to exchange money to get back my time and to get smarter.

They were more “Deadheads” than “tech bros”.

Paywalls annoy me too. That said, for historical accuracy, the idea that content should be free of charge was hotly debated in the early days of the Internet and WWW. People like Jaron Lanier felt that online discourse would suffer if there wasn’t some nominal cost to, say, sending an email.

>People like Jaron Lanier felt that online discourse would suffer if there wasn’t some nominal cost to, say, sending an email.

Interesting, and I think to some extent it is true.

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