EDIT: For context, I don’t mind people monetizing their content, but in that case I’d rather pay them directly (like GoRails), and not a “subscription” for something I might check once in a while.
Read https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 section What does the checkbox do
That's an official publication of the company behind medium. Maybe they had some bugs in the past or the people who complained or the author just made mistakes.
Try to access this article: https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-refer...
Can you access it or not?
If you hit the preview limit, you get the message "Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from."
Non-metered (i.e. free) content is not behind the metered paywall. Also if the author posts a "friend link" the article is freely accessible, even if metered otherwise.
Do you have other sources?
The average article we publish does 10k views, which for most authors is way more than they'd get self-hosting and posting out to Twitter/FB.
I think also that Medium is still overly dominated by user generated content, i.e. what people here are calling low quality articles. You'd think of that content differently if it were better curated and better edited.
But all of Medium's subscriber revenue gets reinvested in their content. Most of that is author payments, but also they pay copy editors and curation editors. What they haven't done in programming yet is pay for any articles that have had a proper high quality edit. In programming that's a story editor, tech reviewers and a bug/errata updating process. But I suspect that will change because the subscription numbers are starting to be big enough that they can afford to invest in these things.
Medium doesn't mind if you use a workaround - as long as you are using it. The business model is validated and metrics show that users are happy with it. The only way to change their mind is to stop using it entirely.
A thread about changing how programmers distribute written content in the context of HN could actually have an impact.
I mean, if people can't afford the $5 per month that it costs to read all medium posts, they really shouldn't waste the time complaining.
I also don't want to have to buy a domain and have a hosting service to push my own site having to load it up with ads or other nonsense just to make a side hustle possible. So I stick with Medium.
IMHO, you need to write about some cool hot or esoteric feature that solves a specific problem in a new way. Or about how a particular crash bug ended being based on something that everyone else thinks works one way when in fact it works the other way.
Do a search on a topic. Are there already thousands of pages that cover the same thing? If so, write on something else.
Trust me. It's possible to do a lot better than $1.50 an article.
Well... TIL.
works like a charm
A few weeks ago I saw an ad on a blog post. I think it's the only one I've seen all year. I was so surprised, I looked at the source. It was just an image, hosted on the same domain, wrapped in standard anchor tag. It was even something I might consider using, a server monitoring service. I had never been so happy to see an ad.
I mean, if it were just as simple as, he likes gadgets and cycling: let's show him an ad for a new bike accessory -- that isn't so bad.
But when they know what your mood is, what your insecurities are, what your financial situation is, past purchases at one retailer linked with your phone number to purchases at another retailer, how likely you are to buy at a certain time of day, etc and then they show you the right ad, in the right place at the right time to exploit all of those things... that is too manipulative for my taste.
The ads are fine.
Surveillance capitalism is the problem.
Don't mistake the symptom for the disease.
Are you really trying to make the case that Medium is the only way people find and read content?
Now, if it ripped the authors off or engaged in other shitty tactics, then that's one thing. But nobody is responding with that kind of information. It's all a response against the paywalls, and I'm trying to figure out if it's knee-jerk or not.
I mean, aren't people allowed to make a living by teaching others?
Absolutely good point!
I think if I were to rephrase the submitter's comment in a way that aligned with my own views and concerns, it would be:
If your intent is to put information into the world for others to share purely out of charity/a desire to help others, or to get your name out, please consider options other than Medium, as Medium is ultimately in control if whether anyone can actually gain access to the content you've produced.
If, however, as you say, one's goal is to produce and monetize content as part of a personal revenue stream, then Medium seems like as good an option as any (though, personally, I'm not a huge fan of contributing content into walled garden ecosystems where the publisher can unilaterally change the rules on a whim), and folks here complaining that stuff is behind a paywall should go find free content elsewhere.
I am buying from time to time website-based tutorials or other type of content. I agree this creates a new problem: I don't even know what I bought in the last years, what kind of online live books with exercises I bought and from where. I try to keep them in a document, but sometimes I forget and search email to find out.
Still I would like to ask that if someone just wants to share information and it is not focused on monetization then please consider other options than Medium.
A lot of newcomers will not make a subscription there.
1) Free, non-scummy tutorial sample, with the rest offered for money, or
2) Free full tutorial with non-scummy ads/UX, or
3) Free full tutorial with the understanding that this is self-promotion and I should raise my evaluation of the author and seek to hire their other work.
Which of those do you feel is unjustifiably entitled?
Your options are clearly biased towards the fact that you don't want really to pay anything, either in terms of money or ads/attention.
I'm not going to subscribe to Medium or other things like it. I don't like subscriptions and avoid them for the most part, and Medium is effectively a weird bundle of mostly crap I mostly don't care about.
When something is worth it, a la carte works for me. It should cost more than as part of a bundle. (Although I'd need to need your tutorial rather badly to pay the price of a book for it.)
It's literally $5 a month to subscribe to all medium articles, I don't get the problem. That's less than a starbucks latte.
A service must be really compelling and unique to persuade people to commit to an open-ended subscription on top of everything else crying for their dollars.
That's why the likes of Apple are racing to bundle their services for a single monthly family fee, they're getting ahead of 'subscription fatigue' where the mental and financial burden of managing a plethora of small monthly charges becomes overwhelming.
> That's less than a starbucks latte.
That's a perfect analogy. The majority of people in any population don't buy a Starbucks latté because the cost-value assessment indicates it's not worth it on top of more essential daily living costs.