[paulgb]

Unfortunately, substack has also started down the same path as Medium. You'll be reading an article someone sent you a link to and mid-way through you'll get a pop-up that obstructs the content requesting you to subscribe. Just let me read in peace!

If you just want a place to dump articles it's probably fine, but for people hoping to attract the HN audience, do us a favor and set up your own blog. These days, you can host it for free on Render, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel... static site hosting is table stakes, and then you can fully stop pop-ups from annoying your readers.

[disadvantage]

> Just let me read in peace!

Reader View to the rescue!

[pluc]

One one hand.. damn do you guys sound entitled! There's a cost whenever you want to do something on the web, I'm sure I don't need to explain this to you. Are we really mad at Medium for attempting to monetize their infrastructure? I mean I get that ads/marketing is generally bad but how else do you suggest they make money to continue to operate a free service? Can you think of a truly free service? Even distributing flat files on a usb key or stapling printed sheets on trees has a cost, if you don't pay for the product you don't get to complain about how the product tries to stay alive..

[logifail]

> There's a cost whenever you want to do something on the web, I'm sure I don't need to explain this to you. Are we really mad at Medium for attempting to monetize their infrastructure?

Q: Just how much infrastructure does it take to publish a page of well-written content on the web?

[SPOILER] A: Not that much. You can serve an awful lot of static content from a $5/month VM.

[pluc]

VMs don't magically appear or stay on the Internet. What costs you 5$ month uses hardware, Internet networks, and let's not mention virtualization technology. You can try throwing a piece of paper up in "the cloud" and see how long it stays.

[logifail]

> VMs don't magically appear or stay on the Internet. What costs you 5$ month uses hardware, Internet networks, and let's not mention virtualization technology

I run dozens of $5/month VMs. You'd be surprised what you can do with one.

> You can try throwing a piece of paper up in "the cloud" and see how long it stays.

Is that a question?

One answer of mine would be along the lines of "up 126 days, 9:19, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00", picking one of mine completely at random.

Of course you're welcome to pay for AWS/Kubernetes or whatever software [over-]engineering fad rocks your boat.

However, I say phooey to that! If you know what you're doing, a $5 VM is really good way of publishing content for cheap.

[dsr_]

... and we know that either the cost to provide all these things is under $5/month, or the company providing that service is using it as a loss leader.

I don't think it's a loss leader; there are too many suppliers.

[sokoloff]

I’m not mad at medium; I just go elsewhere.

Just like I can’t expect them to give me things for free, they can’t expect their readers to stay when they make the experience shit.

[paulgb]

I would actually be fine with passive display ads next to the content (I don’t even use ublock these days). It’s that I find getting a pop-up in the middle of reading something jarring and rude. I’m not mad at Medium for trying to make money, nor do I feel entitled to anything, but HN is a competitive forum for content and if I see a medium/substack link I’ll avoid clicking it, which is what OP asked about.