Hacker News Reader

Is Medium doing that? I think quite the opposite, their new comment system seems rather encouraging for good quality comments.

I'm not seeing comments on Medium, although I did hear they were implementing a custom comments system. Do I have to register to see them?

If so, that's still not good...

You don't need to register to see them, see this post: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/ef4772e3c628 You'd need to register to comment though.