It's called Medium because the content is neither rare nor well done. I don't hate Medium, but I won't write for Medium until they put me on the payroll and send me a W2 every January. Nor will I read articles on Medium or link to them.

It's kind of sad that Evan Williams went from making Blogger and Twitter to making a content farm that changes its business model every 9-12 months. Medium barely merits contempt, let alone hatred.

Tracking, repeated prompts to login etc.

I have started using https://scribe.rip (and its other instances) for reading medium articles.

Plain? It sends analytics requests with practically every pixel scrolled. The performance is worse than rubbish and leaves a gigabyte of analytics data in your localstorage.

No as in the usual HN links that I click on are plain...

It's one of two sites* I actively try to avoid clicking on any HN links to. The experience is awful. So awful that I have a hard time understanding why anybody would ask why we avoid it... can't you just go to medium and see why? It's pretty obvious.

*the other is twitter.

A little box opens when I mark text. I don‘t like that.

medium.com is an overengineered, harmful mess

Yes. They got all the popular writers, then slid a paywall over it. Seemed like a bad faith centralization of something that had previously been decentralized, hand crafted and individually owned. Like main stream media consolidation in the 80s, maybe.

Eloquent!

It doesn't add any value for me and I honestly wonder how it's got as far as it has.

This is my own personal preference but I honestly can't stand medium. It started off ok, but now It's too bloated and I can't read many of the articles people link. I use an addon to force myself to put in a password if I really want to see a link someone share on that and several other paywall sites. It gives me a chance to ask myself, "Did I just get baited?" If the answer is yes they do not even get a referrer click.

If there was an addon similar to Teddit Redirect [1] or Nitter Redirect [2] that made the site more usable by stripping out most javascript and removing the paywall then I would probably visit it more.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-to-ted...

[2] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...

They go to some length to make things hard to link or quote; therefore I go to some length to avoid pages served by them to avoid the frustration.

Hate is a strong word, I'm looking for a static site generator rn, it's more a dislike of cloud providers in general vs self hosting

In a word: Yes. Mainly due to paywall / user-registration-walls

I'd rather use Wordpress instead. It is free and Medium has a paywall.

passionately. fuckin signup walls.