Bit off topic but why in the world are people still posting on medium? The reading experience is abhorrent; I couldn’t even finish reading this article before a full screen popup literally blocked the sentence I was reading.
Is there some incentive I’m not seeing?
They have made an honest attempt to pay writers. It's a different model than substack, but that's why.
I look at it the same way I look at pay walls for newspapers. I don't like them but I understand why they are there.
Which is why it failed though. It turns out people won't pay one dollar to read an article like "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"
The situation is very unfortunate. We had perhaps once-in-a-lifetime chance to solve micropayment but we fucked up (crypto).
> The reading experience is abhorrent
Nothing you read in the browser can provide ultimately great and hands-down the best reading experience equally for everybody - the modern web model is inherently at odds with that. A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention. A plain-text protocol under user control is closer to "best reading experience for everybody". The web could be that. It mostly isn't.
I stopped trying to read long articles in the browser. Why would I do that, if I can easily extract all the relevant, plain text (and even structured one) and read it in my editor instead? Where I have control over fonts, colors, navigation, etc. The browser is a delivery mechanism, not a reading environment. Treating it as one is a habit, not a necessity.
Long ago I stopped trying to type anything longer than three words anywhere but my editor. Of course, why wouldn't I? It already has everything I need - spellchecking, thesaurus, etymology lookup, translation, access to all my notes, LLM integration, etc. Try it one day - it's enormously liberating experience. And then maybe you'd stop reading long texts in the browser as well.
> A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention.
They don't ship it because of greed. They only want your attention because of greed. They only infest their website with ads because of greed.
> The browser is a delivery mechanism,
http is a delivery mechanism. The browser is a user agent. It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user. If your browser isn't doing that for you it's time to find a new browser or beat the one you have into submission until it behaves. "reader mode" is a useful compromise.
> It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user.
That's right, the original idea was exactly about that, but like I said - in practice that is no longer a thing.
Using the editor for reading any content is enormously underrated. Check this out - this entire thread opens in my editor as an outline with nested structure. Meaning that all the regular outline operations are available to me - folding, imenu (interactive TOC), narrowing, quick search, contextual search, pattern-based search, sparse-tree search.
Extracting all the URLs on the page while ignoring HN-internal ones is a single keypress for me - there's a link to a YT video - I can watch it, controlling the playback directly from my editor, I can extract transcript and summarize it with an LLM request - all without opening new tabs, without switching focus.
I can narrow on the sub-thread, or select a region and export only that part to a pdf, gfm, html or LaTeX. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. A web browser - even with three hundred different extensions won't let me have complete and utter control over plain text - it's just not designed for anything like that.
I'm assuming you use Emacs? Are you using a special "hacker news mode" or something more generic?
Can you share your setup how to achieve what you described? I'm curious.
> Why would I do that, if I can easily extract all the relevant, plain text (and even structured one) and read it in my editor instead?
Because that’s an enormous pain in the ass. Not scalable at all.
I beg to differ. You clearly misinterpret what I'm talking about. Please expand on "scalable", what do you mean by that?
do you use emacs?
It seems like it's just the latest evolution of the writer-friendly blogging platform; easier than Wordpress to package into a newsletter, and also easier to monetize with a paid tier.
But don't we have AI to deal with the complexity of Wordpress? :-)
Insofar as AI is great at accidentally deleting your production and backup Wordpress databases, and forcing you to start from scratch with something else.
My best guess is momentum. Some people are very, very brand loyal and have to do things in relation to what/how others do things.
In reality it doesn't matter where something is posted, just give us a url, but some people don't operate that way.
It's a free, permanent host for your blog articles with a built-in community and monetization layer. There's only so many free hosts out there that I'd be confident will be around in 5 years, and Medium is one of them.
check out Scribe an alternative medium frontend that's why better: https://scribe.rawbit.ninja/@NMitchem/if-ai-writes-your-code...
https://sr.ht/~edwardloveall/Scribe/ https://libredirect.github.io/
Yep, Medium was free and everyone donated content... then it put up reading paywalls and conned everyone, I'm also surprised when I see people writing on there.