As it appears, Medium is starting to use some Dark UX Patterns to paywall content. There have been several false alarms (accidental paywalling, "build my brand" hipsterism etc.) earlier, but it seems they are now all-in on their desperate monetization attempts.
Here's what I did to secure my stuff:
- Exported the zip file of all posts from Medium Settings UI
Copied the "posts" folder from the zip (bunch of html files) to
my github repoConverted them to markdown for easy reading on github with medium-2-md and npx:
$ npx medium-2-md convertLocal html/
This emitted a bunch of markdown files in a new directory. I deleted all the blog comments (nobody wants to read those!) and pushed the files to github, for easy reading. Here's an example blog post
All the gists (i.e. code snippets) are still missing from the markdown versions - so some scripting work remains to be done before pushing them elsewhere.
What didn't work
dev.to offers a way to import content from Medium through RSS feeds. In the spirit of dark patterns, Medium's RSS feed only has a few most recent articles (example here) so I abandoned that path.
Migrating to dev.to?
As it appears, dev.to is fast as heck. Pages practically load before you click them, so you manage to skim more posts per minute. I'll probably push all of these posts there once the preparation work is ready.
The first step though was to move everything to a public static hosting site (github). Now, Medium can go tits-up tomorrow for all I care!
Top comments (1)
I had the same problem with medium and heard lots of bad things over the course of year. Almost did the same like you but end up creating a Gatsby blog from
gatsby-blog-starterand did lot of customisation on top it. As of now still making some tweaks and reviewing with friends. Soon will launch it to everyone.My idea for now for new blog Posts are