Blocked reading the article because medium wants me to sign in.
Is Medium now forcing people to create accounts to read posts or is it just a setting that this subdomain turned on?
Is Medium now forcing people to create accounts to read posts or is it just a setting that this subdomain turned on?
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
The aggressive content gating and pop-ups are another Quora-esque introduction.
Just a case of being blinded by metrics. Adding an aggressive sign-up form might get you more emails and sign-ups, but it will also annoy away better quality users.
Probably because “analytics engineering reasons”—i.e. it wants to correlate the view with some account’s clickstream, and it really looks like that account should be yours, but it also knows that it’s been a while and so it might now be a guest, and so has logged you out temporarily. But it doesn’t just want to spawn a new temporary clickstream that they’ll have to re-correlate to your account later, because that’s costly to server resources in the O(N) case, and in 90% of cases, it still is you browsing.
No article limits, no sign in dialogs.
Their loss.
Firefox 68,Mobile, ublock origin
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-long-complicated-and-e...
There are countless free (and even ad-free) text-only hosting options available. Medium provides nothing of value to me as a consumer. It doesn’t even aggregates the content, people selectively post it to Medium themselves!
I say this as someone that pays for about a dozen online newspaper/magazine subscriptions but will never pay a penny to access a site like Medium or Scribd or Quora or any other site that does nothing but make money off being the middle man.
Anyway, it’s all moot as Medium will inevitably shutter or pivot. Their model is dead, the only reason people chose to post to Medium is because it offered some views. If those views are killed off by requiring a paywall, then Medium itself becomes defunct.
The value is that it's providing a platform to authors who want a platform where they know they'll get readers. I personally don't choose to use Medium anymore, but it's very easy to get people to read your content on there. In the past I've used places like Wordpress, Blogger, my own webpages, etc., and it took a lot more effort to get people to see your content. Whereas on Medium, it didn't take long to get people to look at my content. Few things I wrote went into a black hole.
> I say this as someone that pays for about a dozen online newspaper/magazine subscriptions but will never pay a penny to access a site like Medium or Scribd or Quora or any other site that does nothing but make money off being the middle man.
They make money by being a platform to voices you might not otherwise hear because newspapers and magazines pick and choose a small set of authors to write most of their content. If that's not your cup of tea, then it's not your cup of tea.
I choose not to use Medium as an author, but I understand why people choose to publish on it and why some people would choose to pay for it.
> Anyway, it’s all moot as Medium will inevitably shutter or pivot.
Like every other business conceivably?
> If those views are killed off by requiring a paywall, then Medium itself becomes defunct.
Is that actually happening?
That's providing value to the authors, not the readers.
Author's own blog or site. If they do not want to do it that's fine. They can chose Medium I can chose to not read.
You can choose to not read Medium articles, but authors are using it for a reason.
OneZero is a publication owned and operated by Medium.