> I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something

https://makemediumreadable.com/

I stopped minding medium (as a reader) since installing that.

I'm glad this exists, and very impressed with how front-and-center their source code is, but I decided a while ago that I'm not installing random add-ons unless I have a very high level of trust in their integrity.

This looks mostly like CSS hack (even the little bit of JS there seems to mainly query the DOM and apply styles). Such things should IMO be packaged as userstyle files. I think people need to be reminded of the concept of userstyles, and how useful they are to remove the garbage web designers produce.

Stylus is a godsend: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus. Sad thing is, this used to be a built-in browser feature.

As a counterpoint, I find userstyles far less convenient than extensions. In my experience, they are more difficult to install, they work less often and break more easily (because of the "put this thing I hacked together on the internet and forget about it" mindset), don't auto update, are more difficult to find or discover, and the UI for managing/customizing them is horrible.

Sure, there's advantages too, and I like the idea of user styles/scripts, but after wasting some time on trying (and failing) to use them to customize my browsing experience on a few sites, I settled on a Dark Reader + Auto Reader Mode + uBlock combo that makes all of the internet nice and readable with almost no extra hassle.

It requires "all websites", so I pulled the code, read through it, packed it up and installed it manually in firefox ;)

Love this addon. It gives me the freedom to browse Medium again.

I've been doing this too. I'm also doing this with NYT, WSJ, FT -- all publications behind higher and higher paywalls, all publications I tried, but ended up leaving because they still serve you ads on their mobile apps.

Now the question is this: if I didn't care or it wasn't worth reading, why did I click on it in the first place?

Perhaps I don't care about this content as much as I thought anymore. Maybe we've been addicted to reading content, rather than actually making use of most of the content anyway.

PS: I'm trying out The Guardian now. No ads for premium users on mobile.

I do this too. Hate paywalls. But not against the idea of paying. The problem is, it’s too fractured. It feels like if I had to pay for each channel on cable TV, it adds up to way too much when you think about the wide scope of sites I could stumble upon on any given month. And like TV, I’m not really a reader of any news site, I’m a reader of interesting pieces of content that surfaces through places like HN/reddit. Then, you also have the fact that usually the title was enough info I realize I don’t even really need to read the text.

The author has complete control over it.

Sort of. If you opt out of their paywall nagware stuff your posts don’t appear anywhere on the site other than your own feed.

Technically you can opt out. Realistically if you do then you lose all of the benefits of being on medium

The biggest benefit of being on medium is that I can just write some words and push the button and I get a nice-looking web page I can share with my friends. I don't care about google rank or more eyeballs or whatever. But I'd rather focus on writing better words than worrying about the words -> website process. Give me something that's as easy to work with (log in, type stuff in the in-browser editor, push publish - no renting a server or installing ruby or whatever) and looks as good at the end, and I'll happily use that.

That's been around for ages:

http://blogger.com http://wordpress.com

Or self-host wordpress

Yet another reason to disable Javascript - no awful login popups.