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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

I have another submission for most annoying UI problem: Trying to read a thing, but it's on medium.com. The sheer amount of popups and overlays I need to click away before I can actually read your thing, geez.

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The worst is when somebody has a custom domain, but it’s actually medium so I don’t know not to click on the link.

Reader mode is a thing, but if you can suggest a better (ahem) medium to repost it to, I'd be happy to!

(Honestly, I'm sort of with you on the medium thing, but I posted this years ago now...)

github pages + markdown/jekyll ?

every single medium.com blog could be just github pages in my opinion

Maybe substack?

Or Ghost.

The reading experience was so good on Medium a couple of years ago.

Nice! I made my first Ghost post! https://in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line.ghost.io/the-m...

This is one reason why I prefer keyboard-based UIs that do not automatically change anything that affects the UI while the UI is active (and being able to select things by entering a number or a name also helps, rather than having to use the arrows). (I also dislike touch-screen for many other reasons.)

> EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that these misclicks/mistaps are a source of ad revenue

haha ... looks like "follow the money" applies yet again to get to the root cause ...

Analogy to Dilbert’s/Peter’s law: saas will be enshittified until the marginal revenue gain of next enshittification level is 0.

Sometimes you see reductionist comments about websites just being for displaying text - but for medium it’s true.

Sometimes you can disable JavaScripts and that works (for that document on Medium, this works for me). Sometimes that doesn't work, but if you disable both JavaScripts and CSS, then it does work. Sometimes that does not work either.

I redirect to scribe, though that only works with medium posts

https://scribe.rip/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3...

The sheer amount is zero with an ad blocker enabled.

I consider UBO basically mandatory for browsing the web in 2025, too many sites are unusable and infuriating without it.

I had two popups visiting that medium link with uBlock Origin. Perhaps it is possible to get zero with UBO, but default settings don't seem to be enough.

OP might also be using a list like the "Anti-adblock Filter". You also might want to explore the settings of UBO as there are more lists titled "Annoyances" that you can enable to shut out further garbage.

https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/

I think you need to enable the Easy List Annoyances filters.

Your browser should be set to open all pages in reader mode.

Some sites seem to be able to disable reader mode. I'm not sure why browsers allow this but it happens often enough, reader mode just isn't an option on some sites. In firefox you used to be able to do something like:

   about:reader?url=https;//www.example.com

But seems that doesn't work anymore.

You can force reader mode in Safari with Command+Shift+R

But results may vary.

Brave browser on mobile and desktop. I don’t think I’ve dealt with annoying ads or pops for years.

One of the reasons I set Kagi to "lower" results from medium for my searching.

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