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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

When I load a Substack article, I see the article, with only the distraction of the "JavaScript required" banner at the top, and the page works without JavaScript.

When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.

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I also skip any article that is from medium, not just because of the noise on the screen, but medium seems to just be people "building their brand" by repeating what other people have already said.

This is what I’ve found - (medium.com) indicates medium quality at best, rehashed junk at worst.

That's true for every medium, including paper.

FWIW I don't like medium because it is unpredictably paywalled.

Try Scribe, a private front end for medium and GitHub Gists.

https://scribe.rip/

That proxy is great, thanks for sharing! Most annoying thing about Medium pages is the multi-second waiting period while the page is loading. (On Chrome on a M1 Pro, mind.)

You can install an extensions called libredirect that would auto redirect, Medium, YouTube, Twitter and many others to private proxies.

Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe.

https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

At some point, Substack will require Javascript, just as Medium eventually did.

That is an interesting prediction, what makes you think that?

You can open medium links in incognito mode.

I can. I shouldn't have to.

Because you have a right to view an article on medium?

No, for UX reasons. If your content is primarily text and images ... then you should NEED javascript to view page. Maybe it is needed for comments, or some other feature, but the basic content should be viewable just fine. This is good both the readers, for accessibility for things like screen readers, for bandwidth and more. That doesn't mean medium OWES us this, but one can still make the critique.

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