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Comment by throwdecro | Hacker News Reader

I chose random blog post on Medium and tried to copy a sentence out of it. It offers to let me "create an account to highlight a passage", or tweet it out via Twitter, but I can't just copy it and paste it into my notes elsewhere.

Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's a very unpleasant experience.

EDIT: Dialing down my tone a bit here, I should have taken a minute between trying the frustrating thing and posting about it.

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I understand general public can fall prey to fancy UI and easy blogging but I do not expect medium to be used by people from IT who know better.

For example, recently both Dart and Flutter got version upgrade and they announced this via Medium. I mean you have largest Software company backing you. Why would you choose medium for your blog!?

Isn't software development currently just going and picking up what is the big popular name today. Be that platform, database, language or framework. Picking Medium fits perfectly to this mind-set. Move fast break things. Don't reinvent the wheel... Or do when it makes CV better even if you are writing same product again...

medium was a great platform, you can make you own subdomain and mange what you want, then the focus change from make a great blog experience from a modic price for non tech-savy to, try to become a premium buzzfed, the ui is the same but the home screen is full of crappy shit first post(The Real Way to Figure Out How Smart Someone Is it work every time), and you are force to premium or kick like happens to hackernoon and freecodecamp

One of the founders of Hackernoon here. They didn't kick so much as "you cant make any money here, and we are going to make it difficult for you to operate"

Ev and co arent bad people. Im actually a fan, but i think he is shortsighted in his goals.

It's not like Google has it's own blogging platform...

Shhh, don't tell them! They'll kill it if they remember it's there.

> Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material

The real mistake was giving web developers the power to do this in the first place. It was meant to help usability by preventing selection of things that weren't meant to be selected.

Of course the first thing people did instead was abuse it in order to protect "their content".

It's even more frustrating when it some programming related blog and you can't copy and paste the code snippet

The worst part is this can be activated with CSS.

There's a lot of genuine use cases for pointer-events: none, so it's a difficult issue to navigate.

Also, the code snippets often don't work when you paste them because of the "smart quotes".

No need to dial your tone down, the absolute fucking baboons whose idea that level of restriction on a website was deserve every bit of hate and criticism they get.

Reader mode is your friend. (Not that I'm a supporter of this pattern)

It seems that you’re using a user-hostile agent instead of a user agent.

It's been this way since they launched, hasn't it?

I tell you what would be really nice: a browser that lets me click & launch into reader mode directly.

None of these shenanigans with Turing complete JS. Just give me text to read.

Can you not do this with browsers? Turning off JS should get rid of most of the egregious stuff, and I think at least Firefox lets you strip out CSS and inject your own (or if not, then via plugin like Greasemonkey)...

Maybe? The experience would be:

- Normal model with JS on (modulo ad blocker/flash blocker)

- Oh, hey, a site that plays shenanigans with text!

- Rightclick, open in reader view

> I tell you what would be really nice: a browser that lets me click & launch into reader mode directly.

Safari can be set to use reader mode by default (then you can tell it to ignore individual sites). I use it in this mode.

Safari is stuck in the dark ages of Apple lockin, isn't it?

> Safari is stuck in the dark ages of Apple lockin, isn't it?

Why would Apple be obligated or even incentivised to make their browser for other operating systems?

Same reason smart musicians embraced Napster. Led to more sales as the world shifted to streaming.

In what world would they not want their browser to be used?

They used to support Safari for Windows but it was a lot of work. It was worth it so that developers using Windows had a change of testing for Safari as well. Once the iphone came out and Macs became popular development machines in their own right, the burden of supporting Safari on Windows stopped mattering.

In Google's case the opposite applies: they don't have a development platform but need ubiquity because collecting user data is their reason for being. So they need to support a lot of platforms for the sake of their customers' (i.e. companies buying ads).

I'm not sure I would call it "lockin" but yes, it only runs on Apple devices.

You asked if any browser does this, and I said that one did. Other browsers supported by your browsing history are unlikely to make this change.

Totally fair take.

Seems like it should be an easy plugin. I'll see if firefox has anything.

Everyone talks about how complicated browsers and the modern web are, and how impossible it is to make a new browser engine, even Microsoft gave up...

What about a reader mode browser engine? Couldn't you make a great browser from scratch by limiting it to this use case?

Perhaps imperfect, but how about [1]?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

I solve that in Safari by enabling the Development menu and mapping Shift⌘J to Disable JavaScript.

Works great for any website that tries to disable right clicking for whatever reason.

> Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's not just user-hostile, it's sadistic.

It's optimized for public sharing of user generated content to social network platforms. Web 2.0 in a nutshell but optimized for outreach, not personal log.

Breaking a browsers default behaviour IMO needs a good justification. This isn't a good justification.

If sharing would be really that important to your plattform, why not add it as an option that doesn't break expected behaviour?

You are not the intended audience.

I am not defending their model nor their implementation.

> Breaking a browsers default behaviour IMO needs a good justification. This isn't a good justification.

Good enough for them though. Their site, their choice. Also, it's not like there isn't many browser extensions to disable that behavior.

> You are not the intended audience.

A site full of programming articles (Medium) probably wants its articles to be read by programmers.

> A site full of programming articles (Medium) probably wants its articles to be read by programmers.

I haven't found official data but programming is in the 25th position and software in dev in the 40th:

Here are the top 43 most popular Medium tags in 2021

    Life (520,000 followers)

    Startup (487,000 followers)

    Blockchain (473,000 followers)

    Poetry (455,000 followers)

    Life Lessons (452,000 followers)

    Politics (396,000 followers)

    Health (374,000 followers)

    Love (350,000 followers)

    Travel (334,000 followers)

    Technology (334,000 followers)

    Entrepreneurship (333,000 followers)

    Self Improvement (332,000 followers)

    Education (330,000 followers)

    Writing (324,000 followers)

    Business (320,000 followers)

    Cryptocurrency (314,000 followers)

    Design (267,000 followers)

    Social Media (241,000 followers)

    Music (228,000 followers)

    Relationships (214,000 followers)

    Social Media (214,000 followers)

    Sports (209,000 followers)

    Mental Health (202,000 followers)

    Productivity (187,000 followers)

    Programming (186,000 followers)

    Food (167,000 followers)

    Leadership (166,000 followers)

    Javascript (160,000 followers)

    Art (152,000 followers)

    Fiction (143,000 followers)

    Humor (143,000 followers)

    Artificial Intelligence (143,000 followers)

    UX (138,000 followers)

    Culture (136,000 followers)

    Books (135,00 followers)

    Photography (128,000 followers)

    Creativity (126,000 followers)

    Data Science (123,000 followers)

    Psychology (119,000 followers)

    Software Development (117,000 followers)

    Coronavirus (115,000 followers)

    Self (104,000 followers)

    Family (103,000 followers)

https://findingtom.com/most-popular-medium-tags/

Other articles I found also show programming articles are in the bottom of the list.

Its almost like someone should have started a programming focused publication on Medium or something :P

I'm not saying that there is only tech content on Medium, but it's a large part of the site. The list you posted has many programming-related categories in it.

I use Firefox with Noscript browser next to my regular browser for any such websites with questionable practices.

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