HACKER Q&A
📣 wtabqo160

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


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.

  👤 throwaway154 Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 akasakahakada
Just checked. My articles are still fully open.
👤 informalo
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.
👤 warrenm
I gave up on Medium years ago - to the extent I added them as a custom block in uBlock Origin
👤 k310
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...