Same here. I have no patience for this type of shameless spamming anymore. One thing I hate about Medium is that it puts a paywall across everything, as if they’re The NY Times. If anything, I care about the author I’m reading, not Medium. With Substack I can subscribe to an individual author and they are the ones deciding what to paywall. Sure Substack gets a cut if I subscribe but that’s in the background.

I'll interrupt this stream of consensus to note I don't have issues following a link to Medium.

Here's how it goes: I open a link, I dismiss a sign-up suggestion screen (if any), I read the stuff, and then I go. If there's a paywall I leave, but I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money.

There are low-quality posts but they are plenty on all platforms (dev.to comes to mind). On plus side Medium articles are comfortable to read without distractions.

Medium is not Economist.

Point me to where I said "Medium is Economist" or cease.

I can count on my fingers the number of Economist articles I read per year while my history is full of recent Medium visits, mostly related to work so stuff that translates in productivity and earnings. They're not even in the same ballpark.

> I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources...

Medium is not similar or comparable to Economist or NY Times.

Sorry for rudeness I shouldn't get triggered by downvotes

> I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money.

Of course but it has to be a balance. Medium does all the things I mention.

If they did just one of those to monetize, ok I'd not be happy but I'd give them a pass. A paywall ideally not because I'm really not going to subscribe after reading only 3 articles.

But doing all of those makes me feel like a cash cow. Like they're grasping at straws desperate to get some cash. They don't understand the user-hostility of this and that's important because the users are their resources.

And as far as the NYT and Economist, I avoid those too. If I really think something is worth reading I'll use a paywall bypass tool but generally I don't even bother.

Maybe that's just me or selective geolocation but in my experience Medium almost never hits with a paywall, and because a lot of useful material is there I am not seeing it a problem. Substack links, for example, are significantly more annoying so I actually take a moment and think if I should even bother.

Agree, this is surprisingly annoying when you click and it tells you "nope sucker, not today, you're not getting to read something you're interested in". Why should I even bother to get my hopes up in the first place?

same with New York Times... and Wall Street Journal... and Financial Times... and The Economist... and many others. I've wondered what it would take to pre-emptively edit HN so i don't even see those links.

It's even difficult to read a medium post on archive.org because the page seems to reload every couple of seconds. (I was in archive.org because they banned somebody who thinks things that they don't think... Or something, it mentioned breaking rules but didn't say which rule, or link to the rules)

Substack does this too, though. In fact I feel like it's incredibly similar to medium in many ways.

Why has substack "won" this market? Or has it really? Is it just due to the newsletter publishing tools and subsiding some big name bloggers?

Substack didn't start doing this until it had pulled significant share from Medium. I suspect it will hurt substack long term too.

In a way this feels like the cycle of image hosts. Everyone moves to the new user friendly one, that one enshittifies the site to make more money, cycle repeats.

> Why has substack "won" this market?

Medium "won" this market a few years back as well. The reason it sucks now is because investors aren't paying them to make the internet reading experience nice. And in any case, readers aren't willing to pay a subscription fee for 'nice'.

Substack is now the leader because investors haven't pressured them to turn more newsletters into paid products. They will, they just haven't now. And just like Medium, the really good writers will have enough capital to run their own newsletters, and use Substack only for SEO. Sound familiar?

Soon, we'll begin to see "name.substack.com" with the same kind of suspicion that we now see "medium.com".

I already do.

Yeah, I want to "not", but sadly it's going that way for me as well.

I have a newsletter for CTOs, and I try hard not to link to Substack any more, the number of my readers seem to automatically lock the article behind a pay wall - Substack is lost I think as a website (don't know about the newsletter aspect).

I have some disdain to link to Medium but it's not as bad.

Medium is the Pinterest of text.