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Theofanis Despoudis
Theofanis Despoudis

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Please don't post Paywalled Medium links

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Seriously?, Almost all the links for technical articles now-days pointing to Medium are paywalled. Please don't do that.

Sick and tired.

Oldest comments (15)

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

From the writer side of things, medium proposes Friend links to avoid this problem.

But the best solution by far is to publish the same article on dev.to and share that link.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Unless it's just a footnote or citation to a proper post, and is well-signposted as external and restricted.

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Edited

I was just hit with a paywall the other day thinking, I rarely read Medium posts and was quite annoyed. I don't contribute to medium any longer because of this single reason.

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roelofjanelsinga profile image
Roelof Jan Elsinga

Exactly this! I moved everything to my personal blog when this started to become a thing.

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m8e profile image
m8e

prepend the url with outline.com and you can read it now

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

I wish there was a twitter bot that unmediums links and comments underneath. Its impossible to read medium on mobile without their sucky app.

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

You can still read Medium without their app, but the page layout is pretty dreadful (who knows: maybe it's dreadful in the app, too, but I'll never know).

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

No, i cant. It literally redirects me to medium://blabla url after 1 second after i load their page.

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Oh. Weird. What phone/OS do you have?

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

Android (8?), opera flow. I think its called flow ;)

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

There's an extension for Chrome (and Firefox too, if I am not mistaken) called Make Medium Readable Again which decrapifies their UI. I still am against the whole idea of the paywall. I applaud the Dev.TO staff (along with the entire awesome community) for finding creative ways to pay the bills without shoving advertisements in or faces repeatedly

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Most folks in this thread have probably already read this post, but I'll link it because it touches on this...

Paywalls are generally frustrating, particularly as a mechanism for viral growth. Having users pay directly instead of having it run through ads could be a good thing (Netflix, etc. is generally well liked by consumers) but it's not content that gets consistently linked to.

The big issue is that the software ecosystem runs on widely shared, free and open content. We just couldn't do our jobs the same way if GitHub issues or Stack Overflow posts wound up getting paywalled.

So yeah, don't link to paywalled stuff. Stack Overflow has been growing their Stack Overflow for Teams line of business which offers a private version of the service for big companies to create an internal knowledge-base, and this works in complement to the free Q&A service. I'm pleased with that approach.

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akashkava profile image
Akash Kava

Also, no links to any article, I don't think dev.to should become a link aggregator, content should be posted here so it can be discussed here.

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

Yeah. Ideally dont post medium links at all.

It is very hostile, especially on mobile where i get redirected to some non-existing "medium://" url that shows me 404 because i dont have their app.

I refuse to install their BS app to read web. I wish all technical writings moved to dev.to.

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

It's kind of like my Google Tiles: whenever a tile takes me to a site that is paywalled, I have two reactions:

  1. "Dafuq? Seriously??"
  2. Hitting the "Do not show further tiles from <SITE>"