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Comment by motoboi | Hacker News Reader

People, please don't post things in medium, because it wants people to sign up. Use GitHub pages or anything else really.

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I'm torn on this, honestly.

We want an internet with less ads, but good writers deserve to get paid. They can get paid via Medium (though how much, I don't know) through subscriptions. Is that the worse than ads or newspapers?

If all it wanted was for me to chip in a dollar I wouldn't care. I pay for plenty of substacks.

Medium is just painful to use.

And what is it with all these websites that somehow disallow zooming so I can't even see what the diagram is? And why does my browser listen? Is there a browser I can switch to that will always allow zooming? I don't care if it breaks the flow or whatever, I just want to read your diagrams!

Not a front-end dev obviously

Yes you can force this in most browsers, generally hidden behind a flag. Be aware it will break websites such as Google Maps and similar stuff.

Oh awesome, thank you for the education. I'll look into that.

Five dollars here, five dollars there. It gets expensive.

My rule is that if I spend an hour a week (on average) using a source, they deserve a bit of money.

There's a videogame streamer I like. I probably watch 4-8 hours of her content, as she live translates Japanese games while playing them. At $5/mo, that is the cheapest source of entertainment available aside from used books.

For blogs I read once a blue moon, I don't typically contribute unless it's worth supporting.

Ideally they'd be self hosting a blog and make more money than whatever medium lets them have after their fee

How? Through a membership system or through ads or sponsors?

Lots of people hate the ad system, won't pay for an individual blog, and get tired of hearing/seeing thr same 10 generic internet sponsors (nordvpm, express vpn, skillshare, etc.)

Ask for donations. Say you have a blog with a thousand regular users, what do you get maybe $1 for that many views on an ad? One user donating $20 once a month otoh would make you a lot more money per user on average than relying on ads.

What you say is true, but that doesn't mean it should be posted to HN. The purpose of this site is to discuss articles. This one's behind a paywall. Even if you sign up for a free account, you may have used up your two free articles per month. That invites people to comment without reading the article. That's not why HN exists. (I actually checked the comments hoping someone posted a copy of the article.)

An incognito window is all that is needed for medium.

I've seen other pay walls posted in HN that take more to get around.

Medium annoys me far more than e.g. Bloomberg, to the point that I actively avoid Medium links unless it's an author I know or the comments indicate substantive content.

I enjoy good writing, but the only writing I'm willing to pay for is print books (I just bought a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fall of Gondolin", the hardcover, illustrated one by HarperCollins). I don't want to pay for newspapers, for investigative journalism, or for long form article magazines like The Atlantic or The New Yorker. Nevermind Medium of all places, because Medium has no barrier of entry. No gatekeeping (and, given how easy it is to merely write a blurb of text, I have rather high standards for what I choose to pay to read). I'd rather consume from the likes of Amazon and have them run these writing platforms (e.g. WaPo) at a loss. Which means I'm paying for writers, in the end, just in a very indirect way. This sits well with me.

But if the choice before me was to pay for writers directly (like Medium), or let non-book writers as a profession disappear, I'd opt for the latter. You may criticize this attitude. I assume the responsibility for that and I'm being honest.

I want a world where I pay creators directly.

Brave browser allows me to send tips to content creators. I like it.

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021123971-How...

Exactly. Won't read because it requires sign up.

It seems rude to derail an entire thread because of author's choice of CMS.

I too generally avoid Medium, but I wouldn't demand someone else change their choice of publisher to please me.

If from the comments here, or wherever is referring me to an article, I get the impression that it will be interesting/useful to me, I'll maybe go look, if not then I won't. Or sometimes the discussion the link starts is enough such that I get useful references of things to look at in other places instead (or just learn what I might want to from the discussion directly). Heck, sometimes just the subject is enough to start searching for other references.

There is also hashnode.com

If you're on Firefox there's an extension to bypass this (only for Medium's free articles) - https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

I'm not keen on playing the browser plugin escalation game with fundamentally UX hostile sites like Medium. They clearly have no respect for the human being at the end of the line trying to simply read a document.

This is extremely melodramatic. They literally just want money so they don't have to run ads

For this article, anyway, they don't want money. At least, the form claims that signing up is free -- so they just want an account created.

(Which I'm not OK doing, because that tells me that they want to track me, presumably for advertising purposes.)

It's worse than that. They took at least $163m in venture money: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium/company_finan...

They've been flailing around for a decade in search of a model that works. If UX hostility is what it takes to have a story that retroactively justifies the investment, UX hostility is what we'll get.

i want money toooooo.

There is also LibRedirect[1] which automatically redirects to an alternative frontend.

[1] https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect

archive.ph cuts through the medium paywall too.

As does basic cookie hygiene.

At least I assume that's what's happening, I haven't seen a medium paywall yet.

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