Same! When did they start doing that? Time to add medium to my hosts file...

I think if the author pays for Medium, it doesn't force you to log in. If they are on the free plan, then Medium wants you to pay instead.

I just stopped logging in (because it saves the "free articles read this month" between sessions in a way I can't clear) and instead delete local storage every so often. Seems to work but it's super annoying.

If you use Firefox, there's a temporary container extension. It's more powerful than private mode, because it looks like a regular session, so they can't detect it's in use. It just gets wiped at the end of the session.

In this case, that only happened to me if I dismissed the blue Medium banner at the bottom of the page (on mobile). Which in itself is a truly awful dark pattern. But if you don’t dismiss it and just scroll you can read the article.

Try turning off JavaScript.

the thing I can't understand is, why do people continue to have their corporate blogs on medium - because that is where the readers are yes, but I think many people come in, get the news they have read too much the past month and then not read the blog. Does medium tell the corporate blog - you had 20,000 readers, or do they tell them you had 20,000 people who wanted to read but only 2000 got to because the rest had used up their free reads.

I bet it's the first one because if it were the second I would move off of medium.

Just block JS and cookies for Medium in your browser permissions.