Once they popped up a "Let's make it official!" thing that wanted me to create an account, because apparently I can't read text over HTTP without handing over my name, email address and manage a password.

I also found the amount of trackers disgusting.

I don't click Substack[0] links anymore, because it's the new Medium

[0] https://substack.com/

    javascript:(function() { window.location.replace( document.URL.replace( document.location.host,'scribe.rip') )})()

What we really need is a bookmarklet that changes all found links to Medium articles instead, so you run it before you click. Or extension that does it automatically.

They don't if you are aggressively blocking their cookies and trackers. They can get what, a page view and an IP address? If that is enough for them to make money out of the thing, then let them.

Any site which teases you with content and then slams the door in your face is obnoxious and aggravating. Sites that aggravate me get negative goodwill.

Eventually, as with Facebook, I avoid them entirely as a matter of personal principle.

My hope is that people with interesting things to share will start to see the decline of their platform and move elsewhere to less user hostile places.

I know companies need revenue, but there are ways of getting revenue without being obnoxious or deceptive.

If you're including only allowing a certain number of free articles a month, or only showing the first few paragraphs before requesting payment to read the rest, I'm not sure what alternatives you'd think would be non-obnoxious (and what's the deception exactly?). My concern is that there's still no good way to make easy essentially anonymous micropayments to sites with content that you want to read - if there were I doubt there'd really be much issue with just having a simple button to confirm that you're happy to pay a small fee (say, 50c) to read the rest of the article. And if the rest of the article turns out to be crap, you just avoid that site. But 95% of the time I end up reading an archive.ph version of an article is not because I don't think it's worth paying money for, but because I'm expected to provide far more info than I think is relevant and then hand over credit card details in a way that likely will result in ongoing recurring charges. I'd actually prefer it if there were simple mechanism for agreeing to have the cost of viewing pages from particular domains added to my monthly internet usage bill. Are there any ISPs that offer such a facility?

At some point we have to trust some online service to keep our data safe, and that service could theoretically provide an anonymous payment proxy.

Ignoring whether one believes that Apple is a good custodian of one's privacy, they already have the email anonymization feature. They could do the same for anonymous payments. That would really only work for small payments which could not be refunded, because the refund process would likely need to expose some personal information.

For me, the concern is not anonymity. It's purely a matter of how much extra noise and email crap I have to suffer if I sign up for "free" access. The user experience once signed in is often just as bad, but differently so.

As for paying for an article, the issue is that most of these sites hide so much of the article that you really don't know what you're paying for. And frankly speaking, most "articles" nowdays are just fluff to raise the visibility of some developer or the company they work for. In some cases, I think that university students from certain parts of the world are being required to generate a certain number of posts per period (as part of their training?). So the signal to noise ratio is continuously getting worse.

100% agree. Can't take consumer market customers for granted like you can enterprise ones.

Best option for them was to drop their costs to bare minimum and show some ads.

Have popular content creators spread the word enough.

1. Focus on the goal, make a good product, attract customers.

2. Think, “we’ve done it!”

3. Need to make money somehow.

4. Money making attempts demonstrates that no, you didn’t do it, you were just selling dollars for fifty cents.

5. Product decays into garbage as you harass the user.

6. Substack et al. lines up to be next rider on this roller coaster.

But I've always had fewer reads on Medium than on my own blog even if my articles seem to have about as good SEO, which makes me think there is a stigma.

Also, my more technical articles that dive into the subject matter more deeply have attracted some feedback that they're boring, too long, and too technical on Medium. I have not received such feedback when people were reading the articles on my own wordpress site.

Medium seems to have a stigma for shallow content, but some of its readers also could have an expectation for that style of content.

It's unfortunate that Medium has developed this perception of it. Migrating content between platforms takes time and is difficult. Maintaining my own blog CMS and web server also involves time associated with infosec and fixing technical issues when they arise. But at least my own website will never become "another Medium" unlike any other mainstream platform I could go to, I suppose.

What about hosting it on wordpress.com?

I am looking to migrate from Medium to bearblog.dev. The markdown format should make any future migrations easier, and also let me write articles offline, without any hassles associated with maintaining a server or the too many (in my opinion) bells and whistles on wordpress.com.

Medium was good until it developed this perception problem though. Although maybe highly technical articles never did fit it very well.

Substack is easy (and free) to set up. You have the option to turn on subscriptions and monetise your content via Stripe.

Ghost gives you more flexibility / personalisation. You'll need some web coding/hosting skills or you can subscribe to one of their plans (starts at $9/mo).

Edit: typo.

If you just want a place to dump articles it's probably fine, but for people hoping to attract the HN audience, do us a favor and set up your own blog. These days, you can host it for free on Render, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel... static site hosting is table stakes, and then you can fully stop pop-ups from annoying your readers.

Reader View to the rescue!

Q: Just how much infrastructure does it take to publish a page of well-written content on the web?

[SPOILER] A: Not that much. You can serve an awful lot of static content from a $5/month VM.

I run dozens of $5/month VMs. You'd be surprised what you can do with one.

> You can try throwing a piece of paper up in "the cloud" and see how long it stays.

Is that a question?

One answer of mine would be along the lines of "up 126 days, 9:19, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00", picking one of mine completely at random.

Of course you're welcome to pay for AWS/Kubernetes or whatever software [over-]engineering fad rocks your boat.

However, I say phooey to that! If you know what you're doing, a $5 VM is really good way of publishing content for cheap.

I don't think it's a loss leader; there are too many suppliers.

Just like I can’t expect them to give me things for free, they can’t expect their readers to stay when they make the experience shit.

In short: Yes. Medium has earned a negative reputation.

This is due in part to the low-quality Medium articles which rank high on Google and DuckDuckGo. This builds in "ignore Medium articles" as a useful heuristic.

More importantly, I cannot be sure if I will be allowed to read a Medium article without making an account.

Their pricing model is unclear and their ToS is unagreeable, and so far, nothing has incentivized me to compromise here and make a Medium account.

True. Every time I've clicked on Medium link the question that I've in mind, higher even than the "will I waste my time?", is "will it allow me to read it?".

I would only click on a Medium article if I was referred to it directly from a trusted source, and I save them to PDF before I continue reading them

But will it affect your articles? Eh, probably not. Some people will refuse to click, but so long as the topic sounds interesting and you actually deliver on an interesting read for those that view it, you'll probably get past the initial stigma there.

Why? Because of the limitations on articles per month and my skepticism that I either: want to bother with being blocked (negative reinforcement is a thing) or, even if I’m not blocked on this one, how do I know if this article will count against my monthly article limit (FOMO-maybe I’d better spend that token on a different article; can’t take the chance)

I’d be more inclined to read an article linked to me from theanonymousone.com. (Others would be more likely to stumble across it on medium.com, though. Top of funnel is better on medium; conversion rate from mid-funnel to read is better off medium.) Maybe publishing twice covers both bases?

Yes, I tend to be defiant when clicking on Medium links.

Although I found really interesting authors at the beginning (maybe they were lured or recruited?) the platform has grown enough to attract users that play the clickbait game with attractive article titles, good presentations of issues, often followed by a poor analysis/conclusion that just leaves me frustrated to have clicked the link.

I pay much more attention to HN comments on a Medium article though :)

There’s some good stuff there for which I use a laptop to browse. The mobile experience in iOS sucks thanks to a lack of proper browser plug-in support (fuck you, Apple). I feel hostage within my own device.

Also, once you post on Medium, that content is theirs to use freely.

My advice is for you to use your own blog. It's harder to build traffic that way, but all of these traffic is yours. In my opinion, a blog well put together is far better that Medium or any similar 3rd party blogging platform.

You may not have the same network effects starting out, but that traffic is yours to keep.

EDIT: Clarity.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

I don’t know how the “don’t paywall my article” works, but I run into paywalled Medium articles all the time.

In the past I've seen valuable publications here and there, I prefer avoiding prejudice on a specific platform/business model.

Publishing on those sites requires minimal effort. As the userbase grows, those sites attract more and more low-quality creators. Although there are many excellent writers on Medium, there is naturally also an increasing proportion of spam.

This flood of low effort content harms the perception of the entire site, so today when we see a Medium.com link perhaps we hesitate to click.

I don’t care so much about the paywall. It is the low quality of content that pushes me away.

Writers saw an opportunity to make money on Medium. This gradually dragged down the overall quality of writing on platform, and likely the reputation of the platform itself.

These days whenever I do click through to a Medium article, it rarely delivers on its title.

I don't click Substack links as well anymore.

Might as well skip that step and rather host your own stuff on own domain.