What do you think about Medium nowadays?

To be honest, these days when I come across a medium article I assume it is not worth it. It might be how I come across them, but the majority of them I encounter seem clearly to be aimed at anything but good information but some other goal.

I find Medium's UI very user-hostile, so I mostly avoid links to Medium posts unless the author or topic is particularly interesting to me. In that case, I use scribe.rip as a frontend.

I used to associate Medium with quality articles, these days though I'll actively avoid any Medium links. The UI is awful, and most of the articles are low effort. I give a lot higher weight to personal blogs, and actively lower Medium in my search results (thanks Kagi!).

I think whatever cultural relevancy Medium had in the 2010s has been replaced by Substack (and Substack’s even losing steam to… well nothing really).

I used it for a brief period of time to write essays about movies, probably would have turned into something more worthwhile if I kept at it (like say a relatively successful Substack) but oh well. Whatever I want to write I just write here now.

I hate Medium and would never use it to "publish" anything. Anyone who thinks they are "publishing" there, isn't.

Every time a search lands me on a site that uses Medium, Medium harasses me to create an account, log in, or even sign up to pay money to them and (hopefully) the actual author. Often after deliberately wasting my time by serving me the beginning of the article, in an effort to manipulate me by making their refusal to serve the rest of the page more inconvenient to me. I assume the end goal of getting someone to log in is to then further restrict access to notionally public pages in an effort to extort money from the visitor, because there is no legitimate reason to require an account.

I can never tell if these are things the authors writing there have instructed Medium to do, or if Medium has taken it upon themselves to enclose thousands of authors' published works and deliberately not serve them to people in an attempt to make money. So I generally blame the original author for being in on this scheme to manipulate people.

I also assume that in general, the vast majority of people do not actually log in or create the offered account, and therefore do not actually read any complete articles on Medium, and that content posted there is widely regarded as not actually available to be read.

My only direct interaction with Medium is when I read Admiral Cloudberg plane accident analysis articles on there (which is something I learned about from Reddit). It is better than the alternative source for that person's articles (that being Imgur). It simply is me, the reader, accessing a specific content creator. I can go directly to their content and read everything posted without needing to create any account. Still, I want to read what that person posts and I learned of them elsewhere on the Internet (and not on Medium).

When you go to Medium's main page, you have an option to start reading right on their main page. This presumably would encourage you to stay on Medium to read some awesome content creators which Medium would feature. Instead, I get a notification that I must create an account to go onwards. There is nothing encouraging me to do such a thing... and while I can start clicking around on the top menu of the site to learn more, it would also assume that I would be driven to find a reason to create an account. Still, clicking around on the menu pages doesn't quite give a good reason to me to create an account unless I want to write something.

A creator has many different platforms on the Internet which they can post their content. They have to feel comfortable using whatever they want to use. When Admiral Cloudberg was using Imgur, an image hosting site, as an article posting medium, I was going there and reading the content. It was clunky and a bit goofy to read articles on Imgur but the content was worth it. So it didn't really matter where that person posted content since it was worth it to me to figure out how to read that content wherever it was posted.

As such, Medium just feels like a place for creators to use. The creators then find the readers. As a reader, I don't feel a direct desire to try to engage with Medium to maybe find someone's content that I may possibly want to read. It would likely help Medium more if certain high quality creators were featured for everyone to learn about (even people without accounts) with (at worst) deeper searching being restricted to account holders.

I think I'm a bit burned out on having to create an account in order for me to then learn about why I would even want to interact with something in the first place.

That's a well-written article about the business. (I assume there's stuff it sweeps under the rug, but it seems more honest than most.)

I see Substack as the most popular place to blog these days. There are several authors I like there, versus none on Medium. Perhaps I should look around? But it's not clear how to do that without signing in. On Medium's front page, "start reading" goes to a sign-in prompt.

About the UI: I got two prompts to either sign up or sign in just by clicking on that link. They didn't appear again the second time I loaded the page, but the "sign up" prompt did when I followed a link to a different page. It's not a good first impression, but the website is pretty clean after dismissing the prompts.

Substack also has its annoying prompts to subscribe, but the blog owner can turn them off. I typically end up signing in on a blog when I want to upvote an article or comment.

I couldn't read that article you linked unless I used https://scribe.rip, so there you go. I know it's more profitable for them to be annoying about signing up and whatnot but I find it too annoying on a personal level.

I don't see the point of publishing on a site with a paywall, the main goal of these platforms it to make it easy for you to write and for others to read your content, and as it is now, it fails exactly at that.

I have them blocked on my search engine. I don't like the site at all, it's hostile to its visitors, and the articles are barely ever worth reading. As soon as I could do something like block the site from my searches, I did so.

I don't think much of Medium. Perhaps just below "neutral" feeling. Many times, article bodies are account gated. From day one, I never made an account, never got into their interactive or social features. Seemed like just a fancier hosted Wordpress.

There are a long-running community rant on the Fediverse a couple of years ago, about how Medium had become (or was becoming) a nazi bar, and that leadership was, at least, okay with that.

I did not really do my due diligence on the claim, but what little I did investigate, it seemed to be a fair assessment.

Scratched the platform off my list after that.

I hate it. It's awful, bloated, closed, and corporate. I close the tab as soon as I notice I am on a Medium website.

The content is usually slop. If I trully need to read an article on Medium, it is usually an adversarial interaction where I try to defeat the author's intention to hide the valuable content under as many useless words they can possibly write.

Blog posts are great but I would need to see some radical concrete changes before even thinking of giving Medium a chance.

EDIT: and no, I am never creating an account to read a random blog.