Remember the RSS reader that was posted recently which generated new feeds by scraping websites?

I was thinking of making something similar for Fandom pages to remove all of the page bloat. The content is CC-licensed so I think it should work. The idea is that you'd have a website which acts as a proxy for every Wikia/Fandom site and forwards the content to a MediaWiki instance with a minimalist theme and renders it there.

The main issue I came across was that it turns out the wikitext format is highly implementation-depdendent and you'd basically need a full installation of MediaWiki to convert it to HTML.

I don't know about Medium's terms for its content, but maybe having a self-hosted proxy for personal use would work. I'm surprised the proxy idea hasn't come up much for taking control of content from websites with dark patterns.

Are there any advantages of using Medium over Wordpress.com?

I can usually get around the issue by opening a private tab or by disabling JavaScript before reopening the page. Seems they try to limit your number of views to Medium articles and try to force you to pay for the privilege of viewing more than a few.

But I agree, most of the time I don't even bother reading after encountering the paywall.

I'm not sure if things have changed but the paywall is completely optional if you're in the partner program, although it is an opt-out setting on each post you make (if you're in the partner program). You will lose out on discoverability through the medium platform if you do this. This affects search engine rankings as well.

>To remove your story from the paywall, follow these instructions. Because your post will no longer be a part of our metered paywall, it will also no longer be recommended to readers, except those who follow you.

>At the moment, you can only unmeter a post if you're in the Partner Program. We're working on adding functionality that gives writers who aren't in the Partner Program the option to unmeter previously metered posts. In the meantime, you can join the Partner Program to see the option to unmeter your posts.

Install NoScript browser extention, then ban medium.com