I'm getting pretty irritated that the Web is inundated with Medium. It used to be just a nice blog host, and now I don't even know what it is. Glad Substack is picking up steam.

You know Substack has paid subscriptions too, right?

How is substack today different from Medium a few years ago? More importantly, what's different about their incentives that will prevent them from becoming what Medium is today?

"One needs to login to read."

Not if Javascript is disabled. No need for cookies either.

Alternatively, blocking cdn.client.medium.com where the Javascript is sourced in Developer Tools or via ad blocker, /etc/hosts, DNS, etc. will work, too.

There's a lot of countermeasures listed here in the responses, including this. :)

Good to know but the default experience matters. I have a beef here and I want the author to know that they need to switch blog host if they want their articles to be out on the open web and not behind logins or whatever.

I was careful to only quote the first sentence of the comment. I understand and agree with the point being made in the remainder of the comment.

I also think the "default experience" matters in terms of web browsers. Why do they all default to Javascript and cookies enabled. In this case, and there are hundreds of thousands of others, neither was technically necessary to read the blog.

pictures fail to load when I block the domain

Some of the images do not load when Javascript is disabled because the web developer has chosen to include three different-sized copies of the same image and use Javascript to emulate a "zoom" effect.

Quick fix: remove the <noscript> tags

   curl https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-with-a-nvme-boot-drive-d9ab4e8aa3c2 |sed 's/<noscript>//g;s/<.noscript>//g' > 1.htm

   firefox ./1.htm

Note you can still zoom on these images. Right-click and open the image in a new tab, then zoom. Or you can open the larger versions in a browser tab and then zoom. The full URLs for all different-sized copies of images can be seen with view source.

Yup - second time today I am also required to log in. No thanks.

True, but this IS Hacker News, and most of us in here can easily get around this particular one .

Yes, but it's pretty annoying nonetheless.

https://outline.com/aS4yWR

The Medium Unlimited browser addon works pretty well: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/medium-unlimited...

Incognito helps override this.

FWIW, no login with Firefox, ublock origin, and a pihole.

I don't think you understand how Medium works. This is part of the paywall, pay-wall is opt-in for content.

And incognito browser will get you to read the post for free, but I won't get any royalties as the author, if that's what you want.

I honestly don't understand why developers have such a problem valuing their time and the time of others.