Seriously?, Almost all the links for technical articles now-days pointing to Medium are paywalled. Please don't do that.
Sick and tired.
Theofanis Despoudis @theodesp
About: Senior Software Engineer @wpengine, Experienced mentor @codeimentor, Technical Writer @fixate.io, Book author
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Please don't post Paywalled Medium links
Publish Date: Aug 26 '19
20 15Comments 15 total
Ben SinclairAug 26, 2019Unless it's just a footnote or citation to a proper post, and is well-signposted as external and restricted.
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦Aug 26, 2019I was just hit with a paywall the other day thinking, I rarely read Medium posts and was quite annoyed. I don't contribute to medium any longer because of this single reason.
Roelof Jan ElsingaAug 26, 2019Exactly this! I moved everything to my personal blog when this started to become a thing.
Paweł KowalskiAug 26, 2019I wish there was a twitter bot that unmediums links and comments underneath. Its impossible to read medium on mobile without their sucky app.
Thomas H Jones IIAug 28, 2019You can still read Medium without their app, but the page layout is pretty dreadful (who knows: maybe it's dreadful in the app, too, but I'll never know).
- Paweł KowalskiAug 28, 2019
No, i cant. It literally redirects me to
medium://blablaurl after 1 second after i load their page.
Scott SimontisAug 30, 2019There's an extension for Chrome (and Firefox too, if I am not mistaken) called Make Medium Readable Again which decrapifies their UI. I still am against the whole idea of the paywall. I applaud the Dev.TO staff (along with the entire awesome community) for finding creative ways to pay the bills without shoving advertisements in or faces repeatedly
Ben HalpernAug 26, 2019Most folks in this thread have probably already read this post, but I'll link it because it touches on this...
Paywalls are generally frustrating, particularly as a mechanism for viral growth. Having users pay directly instead of having it run through ads could be a good thing (Netflix, etc. is generally well liked by consumers) but it's not content that gets consistently linked to.
The big issue is that the software ecosystem runs on widely shared, free and open content. We just couldn't do our jobs the same way if GitHub issues or Stack Overflow posts wound up getting paywalled.
So yeah, don't link to paywalled stuff. Stack Overflow has been growing their Stack Overflow for Teams line of business which offers a private version of the service for big companies to create an internal knowledge-base, and this works in complement to the free Q&A service. I'm pleased with that approach.
Akash KavaAug 26, 2019Also, no links to any article, I don't think
dev.toshould become a link aggregator, content should be posted here so it can be discussed here.- Paweł KowalskiAug 26, 2019
Yeah. Ideally dont post medium links at all.
It is very hostile, especially on mobile where i get redirected to some non-existing "medium://" url that shows me 404 because i dont have their app.
I refuse to install their BS app to read web. I wish all technical writings moved to dev.to.
- Thomas H Jones IIAug 28, 2019
It's kind of like my Google Tiles: whenever a tile takes me to a site that is paywalled, I have two reactions:
- "Dafuq? Seriously??"
- Hitting the "Do not show further tiles from <SITE>"
From the writer side of things, medium proposes Friend links to avoid this problem.
But the best solution by far is to publish the same article on dev.to and share that link.