It's amazing how unpleasant most media sites are to read. Medium may still be better than most, but, like Gruber points out, they've been heading down a bad "growth hacking" path lately.
What really blows my mind is how awful so many websites from old publications with high-quality print editions are. A lot of these publications had quality standards for advertisers, and they worked hard to design nice-looking print layouts. As a result, even if there were a lot of ads they were at least unobtrusive and often kind of interesting and worth looking at in and of themselves. But it's like publishers are somehow incapable of thinking about a website the same way they think about a magazine.
When I end up on a website that takes fifteen seconds to load, makes text jump around as different ads are displayed and hidden, autoplays video, and pesters me with popups I wonder if anyone who works at the publisher ever actually uses their website. I mean, who, in their right mind, could ever think they were providing an even halfway decent product?
I have absolutely no sympathy when legacy publishers who peddle terrible, low-quality product struggle and go out of business. I mean, I hate to see media power consolidating into Facebook's hands, and it sucks when people lose their jobs, but these publishers have no one to blame but themselves.
That's awesome! I wish there was more content like that out there.
I find I've become more focused on following individual writers/journalists/bloggers these days and less attached to publisher brands. And a lot of signs point to the future of publishing being much more fragmented and focused on individual journalists. But when the NYT does stuff like that it shows how powerful and effective a big publishing organization can be. Maybe new ways for journalists to pool resources and collaborate will emerge?
The steady paycheck is what allows some (maybe even many) journalists to do amazing investigative reporting. I have a hard time imagining another way to have in-depth, months to years long ago investigations.
The NYT ends the article with "If you can identify anybody in the video or have other information regarding the events, you can anonymously submit information through our tips line at nytimes.com/tips."
Likewise, I wish you would have found something more deserving instead of criticizing a solid piece of journalism. Look at the design of the article, the integration of video and text, the restrained use of ads... Even if you don't appreciate the content, stylistically, the are some very nice things about this article.
Come on, is respecting US laws on US soil really that much to ask without the fear of alienating Turkey? There need to be boundaries, even if you care very much about diplomacy.
It is about the environment. When you get beat up on your own soil by someone who doesn't even live here, that's not a good environment. Nor can the economy really function well if the environment is chaotic & lawless like this incident.
I mean, it's puposeful. All of that crap increases accidental page clicks on ads. Most of those aren't useful but every now and then someone pauses at the ad, reads it for longer than usual, and bam, now you've got someone tagged in your tracking metrics as having an interest in whatever's in the ad, and you can target them or sell that info where it can b.e correlated with other data.
1 - direct response advertisers (obviously not all of them, but a big fraction) care deeply about purchases / test drives / whatever. Interactions that don't lead to purchases don't make money for a publisher. fb pretty thoroughly poisoned the well for advertisers paying for some sort of fleeting social interaction, though Snap is trying.
2 - Everyone here complaining about medium and still reading it... it's like that Woody Allen joke --
> Everyone here complaining about medium and still reading it...
At the end of the day the content itself is mostly what matters. As long as people I want to read are posting on Medium I'll read stuff there. And really, it's not that bad these days. But, if the same content were posted somewhere else that offered a better reading experience I'd definitelt to read it there. I do generally avoid clicking on links to local newspaper and TV news sites, since they tend to be truly awful.
Publishers know that content is what matters most, and people will put up with a ton to get to it. But they have a much weaker grip on content than they probably think.
Publishers have a strong grip on content. Writers, as a class, are wildly underpaid and usually struggling. Publishers have no trouble hiring, firing, retaining, and generally replacing journalists. Rockstar journalists with big followings are flight risks, sure, but they are not disproportionately responsible for content output. And at the end of the day, the content business is a volume game.
By contrast, publishers have a very weak grip on us, the end users. We prefer to consume our content on platforms like FB and Snapchat and Twitter, or linked on boards like Reddit and HN. Very few of us are actually direct-navigating to publishers' sites and apps to consume content at the source. And we have decreasing loyalty to any particular publishing brand.
Ultimately this may lead to a weaker grip on content. If anyone can make the economics of publishing work while retaining a smaller staff of better compensated journalists, they will be able to have their pick of the best journalists in the world. The compensation bar is really really low these days, and anyone who pays journalists a comfortable living wage in 2017 can clear that bar and win a ton of goodwill. It's the revenue side of the equation that's tricky to make work.
No, content isn't that important. When a web site thoroughly trashes its reading experience after I move just a few sentences, I immediately convince myself that "I didn't really care that much about this anyway" and leave. It's the only way to maintain sanity anymore because actually continuing to scroll through some of these sites is ridiculous.
The SEO folks are the same dopes who came up with the genius strategy of requiring 5-10 megabytes of privacy-intrusive CPU-intensive JavaScript on every page load that slows down websites. Now they come to their teams and say, “Our pages are too slow — we gotta move to AMP so our pages load fast.”
You gotta admit, that's pretty much spot-on. The resources some of these websites consume is just mind-boggling.
I doubt it was the SEO folks suggesting ads, they've known to prioritise page load time for a whole now. It's the business side of the company at a loss to find another way to make money.
To be fair to them, it's still not really clear what the answer is. But I think we've established it isn't what we have now.
Well the way I've seen it work is usually "we really need to add this new script to our website!" "But you know it will slow down the site for the users and make it slower to load, and slow load times aren't good for SEO?" "It's fine, it loads asynchronously"
That's interesting, because I regularly browse with a LOT of Chrome tabs open. Like, 50-200. There'll be a window with a bunch of datasheets I'm intending to process into schematics (eventually,) a handful of articles, some in-progress shopping carts, a few resources that I might want to read more closely at some point in the near future...
Really, deciding when to close tabs and what to close is kind of an organic process. I am running ChromeOS on ARM, though, so that may be a bit more optimized for having lots of Chrome tabs open. On x86/64, I'd probably have to use Firefox for that kind of nonsense.
But incidentally, I love ChromeOS on ARM. Very energy-efficient, there are some solid models in that rare and coveted 10-11.6" size range, now it has (beta) Android apps, and in dev mode you can pop a full Linux chroot onto it with an extension that lets you surface X sessions to a Chrome tab. Absolutely fantastic, until you run into a closed-source x86/64 binary.
Also, since I have to sync everything to a repository or cloud storage or physical media fairly frequently to use a more fully-functioned machine, it also means that if I lose it or it breaks or I have to evacuate and leave it behind or something, nbd. Data's still there, and they're only like $2-300 anyways - not bad for a secondary computer.
Hey, Apple - you know that 12" Macbook of yours? The one with a laughable single port? Maybe make an ARM version with a popular hackable core chip; like a newer Allwinner A10 or something. You could charge $400-500, easy.
I feel like Apple's target market should be selling solid computer devices that can fetch a high markup and further a brand of exquisite form/functionality, but they have been away from that in favor of a "squeezing-the-walled-garden" model lately, huh?
I like the laptop versions that have screens which can fold around 360 degrees to act like tablets. The keyboard deactivates and you get an Android-style onscreen one when you do, but I think some people don't like that because it does mean that your screen will be fingerprint-y. But personally, I also like having a touch screen, especially since a bunch of Android apps run natively now.
I have the C100 Flip right now, which I like a lot. It has a Cortex-A17 which doesn't have trouble running a bunch of tools I use like KiCAD, Arduino, etc. but I wouldn't use it for 3D modeling or other intensive tasks. The resolution is also a bit low at 1280x800.
It should be unacceptable that you have to install plug-ins and disable "features" in order to configure your browser to not be actively destroying the web browsing experience--which is the only experience you expect out of a web browser. Browser vendors need to take some responsibility too.
Talking about uBlock Origin and Medium, the blocked requests on Medium pages always seem to increase at a regular interval.
Seems like they use some kind of tracker that "polls" user activity on the page. I suspect that's why Chrome seems to use more CPU/RAM when I've got more Medium pages opened.
That's all well and good until you get those annoying modals that say something like "We see you are using an adblocker, please disable it to continue".
Some sites you can easily dismiss and they'll let you browse after (which makes the modal pointless) and other sites won't let you past unless you disable adblocking for that site.
You open web sites with free content that try to make money off you.
They definitely use your attention and collect as detailed profiles of you as possible. But you also pay with your CPU, RAM, and electricity: they'll gladly use as much of it for their purposes as possible.
I use a Chrome plugin called The Great Suspender, it makes a huge difference by 'suspending' all tabs that were not accessed in the past x minutes. You can set it up so it doesn't suspend certain tabs based on URL (Gmail, Drive and Calender for me)
It helps a lot on my Macbook Pro with only 8GB.
If you speak to a journo or someone in marketing at a news provider they'll complain about ad blockers and such, but the moment you say why do you need dozens of trackers on cookies on your site, do you know who those trackers are? They say, oh that's not good is it. But you can bet your bottom dollar that they never bring it up in meetings.
A general suggestion for programming blogs: instead of Medium, try using something like Hexo[1] or Hugo[2] and deploy for free on Github Pages or Netlify. Publishing content is as easy as `hexo deploy` or `git push origin master`.
You get complete control with a static site generator and can remove things like the sharing bar and animation. There is almost no maintenance required, because the site will be a collection of static HTML files.
There's also the good ol' jekyll and my theme Hydejack that I'm gonna shamelessly advertise here: https://qwtel.com/hydejack/
It features a lot of JS that does some pretty wild things (FLIP animations, push-state, touch-enabled drawer menu), but thanks to revolutionary HTML and CSS technology (tongue-in-cheek) all JS is optional and consequently fetching is deferred until after the rest of the page has finished loading.
It's what I'd consider best practice when it comes to publishing on the web: Knock yourself out with all the new JS stuff, but make it optional and put content first.
Thanks for those suggestions. Hugo looks particularly awesome. I've been wanting to spin up a blog so I can write tutorials and such. I actually started building my own web app from scratch for it because I couldn't find a static site generator I actually liked. Hugo, on the other hand, doesn't look like it could be any easier.
I used Hugo recently for a one-off brochure site. It was predictable and straightforward and boring, and generally did what I needed it to do without getting in the way. A+++ five stars would recommend.
I've used Hugo for a few sites now. There is a bit of a hump at the start - finding a theme you like and customising it to your needs. But after that it is fantastic.
I don't think I would use it for my static blog simply because I don't really feel like spinning up a separate server just for comments.
Part of the appeal of a static site generator for me is not having to administrate a server. I can just throw it up on Github or Gitlab pages and be done with it.
Seems like a lot of companies are trying to go “mobile first” while their apps are still missing core features found on their websites…so I just continue to use the websites, even if they are slower.
I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in wanting simple things to work. Things like preserving newlines in code blocks in the Reddit app—since 95% of my subs are technical—or showing what comment of mine someone is replying to in the Imgur app—since it might be anything I’ve commented on in the past few days, or years if someone was browsing in Random mode.
Exactly! The number of services that actually need to be an app to accomplish their goal is staggeringly low compared to the number of apps out there. I would far rather use a well-designed website that works for everyone with a web browser over a bloated, ugly app.
My mental response to those banners - particularly on aggregator sites, but also for content sites - is "does your app support tabbed browsing? Thought not." Losing tabs is an experience downgrade. Apps are almost always worse than the browser for a site that isn't actually an application.
They continue doing this although their webapp is working perfectly fine. They are doing it in a very persistent and very annoying way. It keeps me from opening the first thread per browsing session with it's deliberately mislabeled "go back" button, you have to press to not leave the browser.
Their app is deplorable. I got so annoyed with the prompting that I installed it, but it was just bad. Slow, didn't load more than 4 posts at a time, hard to navigate... :(
Nothing is more obnoxious than Tumblr, which blocks you reading further in the site past the last few posts unless you download their app (or request desktop site)
An HN commenter pointed me towards this bookmarklet recently, which removes such 'dickbars'. I find it invaluable, especially as someone who presses Space to page through an article. (I've modified it to ensure that the page body is always scrollable, which is something that goes hand-in-hand with dickbars.)
javascript:(function () {document.body.style['overflow-y']=document.body.style['overflow']='auto'; var i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i=0;i<elements.length;i++) {if (getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='sticky') {elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})();
Click the link and start to read, I am certainly familiar and similarly annoyed with the first complaint:
>Every Medium site displays an on-screen “sharing” bar that covers the actual content I want to read. This is particularly annoying on the phone, where screen real estate is most precious.
I open the link to the listed example, and mobile.twitter.com covers the top 25% of screen with a login prompt(likely an app store redirect if I take the bait? I use, seldomly, 'Tinfoil' client app from FDroid if I want to login to Twitter), and the bottom 25% with the notice about the ever evolving 'privacy/divulgance' policy.
Oy Vey... Really makes me appreciate the few text only, practical UI, bullshit free sites I have left to visit online, like this one.
Totally agree. I now sigh when I see another article on Medium. It's just so damn frustrating - I come to read the article, I don't want be encouraged to share it before I have even have had the opportunity to read the first paragraph.
And don't get me started on the irrelevancy of needing to download a mobile app purely for the purposes of reading what should be a bog-standard web page.
It seems to be a holdover from the social media goldrush, where no web app was complete without a way to follow people and so on. Thus you 'need' the app to get push notifications about the latest scribblings of your network.
Of course, you don't really, because you can just as well follow the same people on Twitter or whatever.
Most traditional media orgs don't even have that excuse, of course, and are merely trying to cajole you into reading the stuff in a place where you can't turn off the ads.
Along with these complaints, I wish there was a greater sense of urgency among publishers to reduce page bloat. Some news sites require megabytes of javascript, video, and god-knows-what to display a couple kilobytes of text. It's crazy out there.
"Why yes, thank you website -- I actually installed it hoping to get into a discussion with you about it. I'm wondering is it wrong for me to use it? Please advise!"
There's a recent (past couple of months?) website-simplification tool, https://outline.com, which I've been using heavily. Advantages are that it's fast, the styling's pretty good, it works on most sites, and you can simply add it (and a tailing '/') ahead of a URL to view it.
I first ran across it on HN. I have no idea who's running it or why, though the domain seems to have been used by a Knight Foundation grantee a few years back. The contact email hasn't answered those questions (though they've answered a few others), and domain registration is through Perfect Privacy.
If anyone has any information on this, I'd love to hear it. (I'd submitted an HN item on it a week or two back.)
On Chrome/Android, it's what I'm running most long-form content through for reading, as design is simply too annoying (and variable) on too many sites. It's been a few years now that I've said: web design isn't the solution, web design is the problem.
The fact that Medium screws this up is particularly ironic for all the reasons Gruber states.
Even the NY Times is better viewed via outline.com (or https://archive.is) if you want to be able to select and copy text from it. Such as, say, to look something up. Or quote it in an essay.
Otherwise, I see an Internet adpocalypse arriving, sooner rather than later. A browser, or other tool, which simply strips all this crap off and gives a stiff middle finger to site design seems imminent.
For the small handful of app-based sites which really need full app status, sure, throw Chrome or Firefox at them. But most stuff doesn't need that.
There's a "report problems" link (you may have to load up a working page to see it), which allows you to submit bugs.
I've found sites which don't render, render incompletely, or have artifacts (one had, for whatever reason, a framed outline around the text). Letting 'em know what doesn't work may help.
I've just noticed that Medium has also broken the back button (at least in Firefox for Linux). That's a pet peeve of mine, and it makes me angrier than most dark patterns because it's so damned pointless. Like, do you think I'm not going to leave because it takes multiple actions? Or that I'll be anything but less likely to return to a site that hijacks navigation for no reason?
More often than not, it's just a bug. A side effect of the react/vuejs SPA world we live in. Fewer pageloads can be a good thing, but if not engineered properly, a much worse user experience than perceived faster loading.
Using the History api correctly is trickier than most people think.
I guess I would buy that, and I've had my own (mostly lost) battles with the history API. I just expect better of a company like Medium. It's their thing, ya know? Being readable, clean, serious, non-intrusive. If Medium isn't that, they're just another random blogging platform.
Why do people post on medium instead of just posting on their own personal blogs or websites? I understand the appeal for laymen who are not technically inclined, but I see so much content on medium from the ostensibly 'hacker' crowd, and I fail to see why anyone would write there instead of improving their personal brand by posting it on their own sites and blogs.
> People often ask me why we switched to Medium. There were a variety of reasons, but one was reaching a new audience, and another was aiming for wider distribution. But maybe the top one was curiosity — let’s see if we can learn something new.
In some cases, because they don't own a personal blog or website and don't fancy the hassle of setting one up. So whenever they have an article their existing sites can't host (because it's irrelevant to the topic), they stick it on Medium.
For example, I could easily set up a personal site and post my random Medium articles there. But I already run a couple of more important ones with my time, and don't really want to spend time buying another domain, setting up my hosting, installing/customising WordPress and marketing the hell out of it when Medium can give me a decent looking place to put the content for free.
There's also a built in audience at Medium. Not necessarily a large one mind you (the platform is much better at amplifying an existing audience than building a new one), but one that may have not come across my articles otherwise. Especially if I post my work in a publication.
This doesn't add much to the discussion but the term on-screen “engagement” turds, as Gruber puts it, is what I'll be calling them in the future. Really cuts to the heart of what marketing/business development teams have served up to everyone.
I wonder what kind of conversations take place when they're considering implementing this UI bloat. "People love sharing, let's help them share!" Like they're actually helping readers, rather than realize it's a rhetorical lie to help them get past the fact that they have no respect for the end user and are singularly focused on meeting a KPI that will net them more money than the creators of the actual content - you know, the reason why people are even on the fucking website in the first place.
"If we made it clear what was happening, nobody would ever click on that!"
Actual quote from someone I was working with on designing a webpage. He wanted us to basically sign our user's up with his site automatically without them knowing.
I've had a number of heated discussions over the years about whether some new site/app I'm working on needs these social sharing buttons slathered everywhere. They're absolutely a scourge.
In my experience they've often been considered non-negotiable by marketing folks, even when faced with metrics showing that nobody ever actually clicks them.
So I do most of my non-work read of IOS devices. I just avoid / block sites like this. Hey Yelp, when you do not let me go to page 2 in the browser and want to force me to use the app, I stop looking at your site.
Chrome on iOS also gives you a share button (albeit buried under a dot-hamburger menu).
Even if no native share button is available, I wouldn't use any share button provided by the website. Those rarely do what I want them to. I'd just copy the URL and paste it wherever i need it to go.
And the scourge of that fucking "Open in App" button. THAT alone makes me hate Medium. I understand people's ire at the persistent sharing bar, but that doen't bother me nearly as much.
Even worse are the app based "dickbars". Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc... all seem to think that embedding a webview is the helpful rather than an extra annoying step.
They do it because it keeps you in the app more and reduces bounces from native app sessions. I'm saying this with firsthand experience at one of the companies you mentioned.
True enough. And yet, now that the Internet gives us choice across 100+ publishers with a few keystrokes to query the browsing history database, how do we pay the journalists?
> When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.”
Is John Gruber that gullible? Most startups out there are led by someone with a "messiah syndrome". They all believe they are going to change the world; but really it's all about money. Find a "niche" and then juice it till it bleeds, they have no other purpose everything else is just PR. Or worse, "rationalization" where the person actually belives all their own bullshit.
Medium's builtin design and clean UI also gives an aura of professionalism to a lot of shitty writing.
Good luck getting a feed that works for you. My feed was continuously assaulted by random feminist rants with clickbait drama titles.
I also love how they write completely meaningless update notes for the iOS app. Eventually they were called out for it on the iOS app when they posted a huge block of morse code in lieu of actual update notes. Then in the following updates, they add some sarcastic message in their iOS update notes mocking their own users who were unhappy with their random/meaningless update notes. What a bunch of losers.
Also their recommendation system sucks. And your feed routinely gets articles "recommended for you" without any reason given (some say "because you follow Such-and-such-Tag, but many don't).
And even putting my rant aside, what do we have to gain from centralizing all expression through a few controlled gates like Facebook or Medium? Who gains from this?
Gruber's site (1) attracts one of the richest advertising targets in the world, iOS developers (2) serves as a leader for directly monetizable media such as speaking events and podcasts aimed at the same elite audience. His business model enables his reading model. Also, which is more distracting: a "dickbar" or Gruber interrupting his podcast to read a spiel?
I have to admit I actually use social sharing buttons because fb on mobile (the site, not the app) somehow doesn't create a link preview when I copy-paste URLs like it does on desktop.
So often a social sharing button is the easiest way to post an interesting article to my fb. But that's entirely a workaround for as stupid bug in a zillion dollar website.
I'm using uBlock to pick and hide all those elements that steal space on the screen of my phone. It's a much better browsing experience. I won't use those buttons anyway.
It's one of the reasons I'm using Firefox even if Opera has text reflow. Sometimes I wish there is an Open in Opera addon.
A small reminder to throw some money to Ghost if you can and that it's an amazing open source publishing platform actually focused on the reading experience: https://ghost.org/
My fav feature in iOS/MacOS next is the ability to stop autoplay video. I would rather dodge dickbars than fight the cleverly blocked pause button and jumpy video box. If I want to play your video I will click play.
The market will decide. People moved to Medium because it was so user-friendly and ad-free. People will move to the next thing (whatever that is) for the same reasons.
Bloggers using Medium is primarily from the same camp as who added these "UI/UX enhancers": smug post-hipster developers who worship all these things like "growth", "disruption", "engagement", "UI/UX", "mobile-first" and companies like Uber and Snapchat. Medium is the most cancerous and disgusting blog service ever.
I'm on an iPhone 5 and can't adblock without side-loading an app, so I just keep javascript disabled in Safari instead. Keeps these bars from appearing on Medium and everywhere else.
They still shouldn't be there in the first place though.
even better, you can have certain page elements removed permanently without any clicking ... with adblocker uBlock Origin you can right click page elements and block them, I "cleaned" the UI of many apps I use like this ... I often hide bars like this or even whole menu sections or features that I just don't use and would only add to the clutter
I just downloaded it right now. This is AMAZING. Usually I spend a minute or going into the console and deleting nodes all over the place. This is much easier!
I agree with the sentiment, but Gruber can't seem to write a simple article without name checking multiple Apple products and services. They're completely irrelevant here but he still manages to mention his iPad pro review unit and how great safari is.
This from the guy whose site is one of the most difficult to read sites on the net. I've always resented this site on so many levels. First among which was its illegibility. Come on now...
Also all of the posts from this guy are complaint after complaint. Nothing constructive or interesting ever, just peeve after peeve. Like two weeks ago he complained about FB being closed. Week before that it was something else. Just banal.
This from the guy whose site is one of the most difficult to read sites on the net. Come on now...
Come on, seriously? It's one column of text with one column of navigation and a single small non-animated, non-video ad unit, and the text/background has decent contrast. What's the difficult part?
You don't like his opinions fine, but difficult to read that site is not.
I find the text very small (that's easily remedied); the white on blueish gray to be difficult to read; and most of the space on the page wasted. Even hitting cmd-+ a couple times I can't get text to use more than half the horizontal space.
This site is totally illegible for me. Yes I can always increase the font size but the default is just tiny. The whole site is unpleasant.
I still can't get over realizing 5 years ago why Google always directed me to this site when I would googled "markdown". When I realzied this was the guy who made markdown and so I had to read his site as an authoritative source... It's ironic he complains a lot about usability, etc.
What really blows my mind is how awful so many websites from old publications with high-quality print editions are. A lot of these publications had quality standards for advertisers, and they worked hard to design nice-looking print layouts. As a result, even if there were a lot of ads they were at least unobtrusive and often kind of interesting and worth looking at in and of themselves. But it's like publishers are somehow incapable of thinking about a website the same way they think about a magazine.
When I end up on a website that takes fifteen seconds to load, makes text jump around as different ads are displayed and hidden, autoplays video, and pesters me with popups I wonder if anyone who works at the publisher ever actually uses their website. I mean, who, in their right mind, could ever think they were providing an even halfway decent product?
I have absolutely no sympathy when legacy publishers who peddle terrible, low-quality product struggle and go out of business. I mean, I hate to see media power consolidating into Facebook's hands, and it sucks when people lose their jobs, but these publishers have no one to blame but themselves.