HACKER Q&A
📣 PhilipWee

Do you guys hate medium.com?


Seems like pretty few articles are from medium.com, most articles are on pretty plain html pages, is it a hackernews thing?


  👤 EddieDante Accepted Answer ✓
It's called Medium because the content is neither rare nor well done. I don't hate Medium, but I won't write for Medium until they put me on the payroll and send me a W2 every January. Nor will I read articles on Medium or link to them.

It's kind of sad that Evan Williams went from making Blogger and Twitter to making a content farm that changes its business model every 9-12 months. Medium barely merits contempt, let alone hatred.


👤 i67vw3
Tracking, repeated prompts to login etc.

I have started using https://scribe.rip (and its other instances) for reading medium articles.


👤 ev1
Plain? It sends analytics requests with practically every pixel scrolled. The performance is worse than rubbish and leaves a gigabyte of analytics data in your localstorage.

👤 kbelder
It's one of two sites* I actively try to avoid clicking on any HN links to. The experience is awful. So awful that I have a hard time understanding why anybody would ask why we avoid it... can't you just go to medium and see why? It's pretty obvious.

*the other is twitter.


👤 Traubenfuchs
A little box opens when I mark text. I don‘t like that.

medium.com is an overengineered, harmful mess


👤 bediger4000
Yes. They got all the popular writers, then slid a paywall over it. Seemed like a bad faith centralization of something that had previously been decentralized, hand crafted and individually owned. Like main stream media consolidation in the 80s, maybe.

👤 glaucon
It doesn't add any value for me and I honestly wonder how it's got as far as it has.

👤 LinuxBender
This is my own personal preference but I honestly can't stand medium. It started off ok, but now It's too bloated and I can't read many of the articles people link. I use an addon to force myself to put in a password if I really want to see a link someone share on that and several other paywall sites. It gives me a chance to ask myself, "Did I just get baited?" If the answer is yes they do not even get a referrer click.

If there was an addon similar to Teddit Redirect [1] or Nitter Redirect [2] that made the site more usable by stripping out most javascript and removing the paywall then I would probably visit it more.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-to-ted...

[2] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...


👤 h2odragon
They go to some length to make things hard to link or quote; therefore I go to some length to avoid pages served by them to avoid the frustration.

👤 dontbenebby
Hate is a strong word, I'm looking for a static site generator rn, it's more a dislike of cloud providers in general vs self hosting

👤 slater
In a word: Yes. Mainly due to paywall / user-registration-walls

👤 cable2600
I'd rather use Wordpress instead. It is free and Medium has a paywall.

👤 joshxyz
passionately. fuckin signup walls.