Ask HN: Medium paywall popup on all articles, and do you post there? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Medium paywall popup on all articles, and do you post there?

10 pointswtabqo16010 comments

Lately, I've encountered more nagging Medium paywall popups while reading articles, even though the articles themselves don't appear to be restricted. It's baffling because the size of these popups is quite distracting. I'm curious why people continue to post on that website when they don't have control over their content, especially when alternatives like Substack are more transparent.

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Medium's gone the way of Quora for me; the domain has negative associative value meaning I skip anything linking there.

Let me explain the negative association:

* Popups and other pleas to make an account.

* Half hearted articles much of the time, linked to.

* Seeming a platform for self promoters with much noise but little original substance.

* That drags everything else down.

That said, I never did see it as much. I'm not much attracted to substack unless very specifically linked from another source, My association there's with people with many words that they want to shove down my inbox; people with many words that they want to shove down my inbox are also often more focused on 'readership' than sharing deeper stuff - deep is by definition harder to cognitively access than surface.

From sighting a URL I'm far more likely to go with a url I've never heard of than Medium/Substack/et al. While firstname_lastname.tld is very often a sign of quality, in my book giraffepoop.wtf is still > Medium/etc.

I gave up on Medium years ago - to the extent I added them as a custom block in uBlock Origin

I used to post on Medium, but I've long since moved on from posting there. The paywall setup is one of the reasons for this, but the low quality content, lack of visibility for less popular creators and degraded site experience are also factors as well.

As for why others post there? Well, in theory it's free visibility, since there's the chance someone may find your work when viewing another article. And the paywall setup is easier to use than setting up your own monetisation system on your own website, especially if you're very non technical.

But all these things are becoming less important over time, and I suspect the majority of popular creators have just moved onto Substack or other solutions entirely.

Regarding nags, Often "reader view" in Safari makes them go away. Turning off JavaScript often helps, and then there are archive.{ph,is,md} and so forth.

This includes "ad-blocker blockers" and related nags and bitching.

Paywall bypassers that clear cookies help at times. Bypass Paywalls Clean left the extension stores and has to be manually installed.

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

Just checked. My articles are still fully open.

The writer might have access but for the rest of us reading there's a paywall popup waiting on your stories to join Medium.

No I did not login. Viewed as anon.

Also opened 5 articles to see if there is "3 article per day limit" as usual, not happening.

Everything I post is set to non-monetized, so what you might see is just people ticked that monetize box.

For non-monetized (without gold-star) articles:

Without login: https://imgur.com/a/ioFGzrM With login: shows a "Become Medium member for $5 per month" header link

Maybe it's different for regular users?

Oh I saw the same thing in mobile version. Indeed the discoverability of the X at the upper right conner is far batter in mobile than desktop. I can just close it and keep reading.

It seems to me like this is only happening to articles from bigger publications. Perhaps because these publications have Medium monetization options turned on and this paywall is suddenly applied to all monetized publications as a "new feature"? Terrible, really.

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