@Ox this surprises me less than it should

@MasseR there's a Firefox plugin that removes all that crap. That's not the point however, it shouldn't be broken in first place. If the authors want to have their blogs available for an audience, they should look for something that doesn't kill UX by default.

@blizzz yeah and I'm using private mode anyway, so as far as they're concerned, it's always my first article of the month. I just wish the content wasn't there

@blizzz @MasseR I mean... if they just had it in the bottom like: "Hey, we also have an app you can use for easier access", it'd be alright... but literally cutting you off because you don't use their app? jezus

@finlaydag33k @blizzz they also cut you off for using their app. Paywall after 3 articles

@freddyym Sure, there are several tools and workarounds. But has it to be necessary? From the point of view of a blogger, who wants to reach some audience? As a potential reader, when you.encounter such a page, do look for a workaround or rather close the tab?

@blizzz oh, I dislike Medium as much as the next guy. If it was banned altogether I would be happy. These tools were simply if you need a work around.

@b0undarybreaker they don't produce any content, but put up a fence if you attempt to read more than 3 articles a month

@blizzz yep 🙃​

@blizzz @b0undarybreaker Which is easily bustable if you refuse to accept cookies from Medium. It can’t limit how many articles you can read if it can’t keep track of how many articles you’re reading.

@Stephen_Stone True, but that is not the point. As a writer, do you want to treat your audience like this?

@blizzz I agree with you on that. (Fuck Medium, by the way.)

@lxsameer @blizzz They just don't get it.

@lxsameer @blizzz medium had fantastic writing tools+ux, good collaboration environment with your editor/proofreader, and decent design for readability. And they host+CDN content at no cost to the writer and take care of the tech side. And all this was true in like 2012 long before the competition and open source alternatives existed in a usable form.

I dislike medium as a business and as a reader now that their surveillance capitalism monetization strategy makes the reading experience so awful, and I wouldn't advise anyone to use it, but I have a lot of sympathy for why a writer would reasonably end up there ...

@eqe @blizzz
Based on you're argument, Since it has good tooling and a managed service, it's ok for people to give them the ownership of their content. It's like programmers who publish their software on gitlab or github give the ownership of their program to gitlab or github. Tooling is important but these days there are many other alternatives that won't own your content.

@lxsameer @blizzz sorry I wasn't clear - I'm not making an argument, I was answering the question which I had assumed was being asked in good faith "why would someone choose to write on medium?". If you're looking for a strawman to attack you'll need to find somebody else :)

Have a nice day!

@eqe @blizzz Sorry mate, I didn't mean to offend you and I don't think that you've attacked me, I'm just challenging you in a friendly way :)

@fireglow @blizzz

Thanks!
This reminded me of when and why #signalvnoise left #medium:

https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/

@betoissues It looked innocent from the start. But, was there an option to export your posts? So you can leave the platform in case something happens.

@blizzz I don't think so, only to import them. Your posts aren't even discoverable if you're not part of the paywall.

@robelix
Except Flash was better, because there was only one, instead of each site having its own.
@blizzz

@wolf480pl @robelix @blizzz And that no one would seriously write their whole website in flash.

@lanodan @wolf480pl @blizzz @robelix Well, there was Wix.

@normandy @blizzz @robelix @wolf480pl Which everyone knew it was basically garbage at some point.

@lanodan @normandy @robelix @blizzz @wolf480pl Oh my god that's what it was doing?

I was forced to use Wix for school and was baffled by how slow it was.

@lanodan @robelix @blizzz @wolf480pl oh, sweet summer child...

@robelix @blizzz I still have a pit of hate in my heart for creating Flash.

@penny legit. What keeps you there?

@blizzz Uuuuu. Here? On Fedi? I'm confused

@blizzz OH. I'm sorry, I was being too cavalier, I mean that I wouldn't ever click through a registration that pushes through exclusively Google or Facebook

@SeleniumReal @blizzz I had a look at the site and it doesn't look as bad as Medium but unfortunately it's far from perfect,too 😕 Login is only possible using third-parties and not with email address and password.I don't have a birdsite account and hope that I can delete M$ Github some day so that's not a option for me 👎 At least you can read posts without annoying popups there...

@nipos @blizzz Disagree. Having your own blog website is the way to go. It is the only way to achieve ownership of content

@danisantos to be fair, not everyone has the knowledge or even time, to run their own instances. It's ok if the provider commits to fair behaviour, operates on free software and has capabilities to export all posts including meta data. The provider can also/preferably be a not for profit entity or a friend, of course.

@blizzz I see your point of view. I understand it. What I did not agree was the option to use 'should' instead of 'can' (use writer.as, etc.) For me, if is going to be a 'should', less than a blog is not the right choice

@nipos @blizzz was a bit crancky that day. Writer.as and own blog should be the way to go

@xerz @blizzz ...no?

@xerz @blizzz fake-minimalistic UX powered by megabytes of javascript. but it did have that fresh minimalistic-style look..

@epi @blizzz well it doesn't matter if it's heavyweight as long as it feels like it

and once upon a time, it absolutely was as straightforward and delightful as it got, but it was also obvious that was no sustainable business model