[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.