[niek_pas]

Bit off topic but why in the world are people still posting on medium? The reading experience is abhorrent; I couldn’t even finish reading this article before a full screen popup literally blocked the sentence I was reading.

Is there some incentive I’m not seeing?

[xrd]

They have made an honest attempt to pay writers. It's a different model than substack, but that's why.

I look at it the same way I look at pay walls for newspapers. I don't like them but I understand why they are there.

[raincole]

Which is why it failed though. It turns out people won't pay one dollar to read an article like "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

The situation is very unfortunate. We had perhaps once-in-a-lifetime chance to solve micropayment but we fucked up (crypto).

[tommit]

yup, I still wonder if BAT was onto something. loved the idea, never took off. oh well

[nickff]

It seems like it's just the latest evolution of the writer-friendly blogging platform; easier than Wordpress to package into a newsletter, and also easier to monetize with a paid tier.

[ciupicri]

But don't we have AI to deal with the complexity of Wordpress? :-)

[DonHopkins]

Insofar as AI is great at accidentally deleting your production and backup Wordpress databases, and forcing you to start from scratch with something else.

[iLemming]

> The reading experience is abhorrent

Nothing you read in the browser can provide ultimately great and hands-down the best reading experience equally for everybody - the modern web model is inherently at odds with that. A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention. A plain-text protocol under user control is closer to "best reading experience for everybody". The web could be that. It mostly isn't.

I stopped trying to read long articles in the browser. Why would I do that, if I can easily extract all the relevant, plain text (and even structured one) and read it in my editor instead? Where I have control over fonts, colors, navigation, etc. The browser is a delivery mechanism, not a reading environment. Treating it as one is a habit, not a necessity.

Long ago I stopped trying to type anything longer than three words anywhere but my editor. Of course, why wouldn't I? It already has everything I need - spellchecking, thesaurus, etymology lookup, translation, access to all my notes, LLM integration, etc. Try it one day - it's enormously liberating experience. And then maybe you'd stop reading long texts in the browser as well.

[autoexec]

> A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention.

They don't ship it because of greed. They only want your attention because of greed. They only infest their website with ads because of greed.

> The browser is a delivery mechanism,

http is a delivery mechanism. The browser is a user agent. It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user. If your browser isn't doing that for you it's time to find a new browser or beat the one you have into submission until it behaves. "reader mode" is a useful compromise.

[iLemming]

> It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user.

That's right, the original idea was exactly about that, but like I said - in practice that is no longer a thing.

Using the editor for reading any content is enormously underrated. Check this out - this entire thread opens in my editor as an outline with nested structure. Meaning that all the regular outline operations are available to me - folding, imenu (interactive TOC), narrowing, quick search, contextual search, pattern-based search, sparse-tree search.

Extracting all the URLs on the page while ignoring HN-internal ones is a single keypress for me - there's a link to a YT video - I can watch it, controlling the playback directly from my editor, I can extract transcript and summarize it with an LLM request - all without opening new tabs, without switching focus.

I can narrow on the sub-thread, or select a region and export only that part to a pdf, gfm, html or LaTeX. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. A web browser - even with three hundred different extensions won't let me have complete and utter control over plain text - it's just not designed for anything like that.

[polaris64]

I'm assuming you use Emacs? Are you using a special "hacker news mode" or something more generic?

[iLemming]

HN threads is probably not the best example because the site is pretty readable already. But it's not that difficult to fetch a thread and render it in the Org-mode outline format. nhreader.el¹ does that. For reading articles I just use eww. it has (eww-readable) that removes all the fluff like banners. The trade-off that eww (by design) doesn't do any javascript. That makes it difficult to use with websites with client-site rendering (React, et al.). For that, I have a little automation elisp² that uses OSA (JXA) and extracts the rendered content off the page. I need to figure something similar for Linux, but it's not so straightforward, the only way I know is to run the browser with the debugger port.

¹ https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader

² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/we...

[uxcolumbo]

Can you share your setup how to achieve what you described? I'm curious.

[iLemming]

see the adjacent thread

[someguyiguess]

> Why would I do that, if I can easily extract all the relevant, plain text (and even structured one) and read it in my editor instead?

Because that’s an enormous pain in the ass. Not scalable at all.

[itsdavesanders]

Its pretty easy with a system like Readwise. Yes, that's ANOTHER system, but its one system to quickly just add articles like these to an inbox and read them another time, in plain text.

Of course, it doesn't work 100% and certain sites are hostile to it and do stupid javascript tricks "for the views".

Mostly, I use it to put it on a reading list later, and to get around really, really abusive ad driven sites.

[iLemming]

> Its pretty easy

100%. One can use mozilla/readability to extract the content. Even if you think that would require some effort, think about it - you have to do it ONLY once and never deal with that kind of annoyance EVER again. It really baffles me seeing devs complaining about shit like that. Why? Why won't they figure out a better way? You're a friggin' programmer - computers have to obey your will. You spend your lifetime staring at the screen, reading and editing text. Why not do it on your own terms? Even if it takes some effort, why choose to be henpecked by someone else's rules FOREVER?

[iLemming]

I beg to differ. You clearly misinterpret what I'm talking about. Please expand on "scalable", what do you mean by that?

[kode-targz]

do you use emacs?

[iLemming]

I do, but nothing stopping anyone from doing the same thing with nvim or vscode. I'm pretty sure, for vscode there probably extensions - it's already built atop a browser.

[chneu]

My best guess is momentum. Some people are very, very brand loyal and have to do things in relation to what/how others do things.

In reality it doesn't matter where something is posted, just give us a url, but some people don't operate that way.

[kelvinjps10]

check out Scribe an alternative medium frontend that's why better: https://scribe.rawbit.ninja/@NMitchem/if-ai-writes-your-code...

https://sr.ht/~edwardloveall/Scribe/ https://libredirect.github.io/

[odie5533]

It's a free, permanent host for your blog articles with a built-in community and monetization layer. There's only so many free hosts out there that I'd be confident will be around in 5 years, and Medium is one of them.

[dsmurrell]

Yep, Medium was free and everyone donated content... then it put up reading paywalls and conned everyone, I'm also surprised when I see people writing on there.

[OrangeMusic]

Same reason people still post on X.