How can someone write this sentence and not even try to address the obvious follow-up question: Why?
I can imagine a few reasons, and none of them makes me want to do what Medium is asking me to do, ”free” or not.
Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized Bread.
Juicero definitely sounds like the inspiration for Doctorow's novella.
I really wish that search engines would start indexing these sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like that.
I know it's not the same but the rise of "Axios" feels just as artificial or pushed. Like all of a sudden it popped up and everyone is "what do you mean you've never heard of them, they're a top news organization." Yet the first time I heard of them was watching an interview they did where the journalist was interviewing a major politician whilst holding a look of absolute disgust on their face.
Do you have any examples of other companies?
Tangentially related: one of those nasty new grocery delivery apps — this one is called 'Crisp' — only works with an Android or IOS app (which is weird, because it is just an online shop for groceries, and it is usually much easier to just set up a website for an online shop, so they are definitely in the game of manipulating their customers to the extreme based on purchase patterns and other trackable behaviour).
All in all, nothing major yet. But yes, very annoying.
I'll vote with my wallet and hope to counterbalance things slightly. That's one way to ensure that there will still be alternatives when ie6/flash/whatsapp are inevitably End-of-Lifed .
Because you’re not using an add blocker.
What I don't understand is why when I'm searching for technical articles, Google ranks Medium at the top of results. Doesn't this fall into the whole "one result for the spider and another for the user" trap to get marked down? It's a blight on the web.
It's my go-to for Medium, almost always already archived and ready to read.
I haven't found a way to effectively get around it with either uBlock Origin or Bypass Paywalls extensions installed.
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
Also works on mobile, if you use Android.
This rant is the default reaction on for any article that is not presented frictionlessly and for free. There must be a metric in the analytics for it :)
Let's call it bounce/rant ratio. Over 1.0 it means that people don't care enough about your article, if it's under 1.0 it means that people can take even more in order to read it.
If the offer is not good, just bounce. The entitlement for for free stuff on the internet is amusing, what I actually wonder is if it is a millennial thing to believe that we deserve it for free or at the perceived inartistic value of our own. My observations are that the older generations and the newer generations have no problem with understanding the concept of paying for content(with money, data or access to you for an upsell later).
The early internet has spoiled us when everything was made for the glory and later in 2000s free again but paid by VCs during the gold rush and land grab.
That's a very ironic thing to say given what the post was about.
I also remember the days when Medium was supposed to change publishing. Back then, Medium were the "good guys". Then they monetised.
I think you have a point there. Why would you be required to create an account, all you want to do is to read an article right? The connection is not obvious, as you said it. Putting a price tag for instant anonymous reading could clarify things.