Medium.com is absolutely rotten for this behaviour.
Not only putting the soft, “sign in to view” but then on some articles requiring a full hard paywall… But you only know this after signing in.
I’m not entirely against charging for well written articles; good writers deserve compensation, but don’t tease me, make me jump through a hoop only to find there’s another much higher hoop sitting beyond it.
I’ve just cancelled my Medium subscription. I was finding myself going there less and less. So many articles saying the same thing in various levels of broken English.
I wonder how mine ai is on the now.
farside.link also offers redirects to working instances and refreshes every 5 minutes
I don’t understand the benefits of farside compared to LibRedirect
Libredirect doesn’t check and update working instances, if I recall correctly with libredirect you have to manually add instances to the list and can only ping the provided ones manually
There’s a few userscripts on greasyfork for it as well
You can also use farside on browsers that don’t support userscripts just by modifying a url
It has been particularly useful for browsing reddit pages without actually going to reddit because I’m not going to give spez my data and libreddit instances sometimes max out on requests so I just have to close and open tabs until I have a working instance
👌
Surely that’s down to the author though? Most Medium articles I’ve read are completely free and unrestricted.
I have no idea. But my gripe is the lack of a clear notice that “this is a paid article and you must be paid member to view it”, it just says words to the effect “sign in to view”.
Here lately it feels like Medium has started their road to enshitification. I’ve been noticing them locking more and more content lately.
A bit over a year ago, I tried writing on Medium, and what I found was no, not really anyway. Medium was putting the soft paywall on all of my posts, without me asking or benefiting from it other than hosting, though I could choose to make them hard paywalled. It was my impression at the time that they would only let you unpaywall your articles on there if you paid them that ransom, instead of every reader (by being a member). You could argue that the authors choose to post there when there are alternatives anyway, so it’s still on the authors (and I do).
FFS! Please name and shame what site that is so we can avoid it!
It was experts-exchange .com
You can really see why they put the hyphen in. expert sexchange would be a very different website.
Ah, yeah, that one site known to be one of the reasons Stackoverflow was created
Thank you very much for the information. I always found it strange that Stack Overflow and Experts Exchange are so similar, yet have such different business models.
For your consolation, many “answers” there are poor and just copy pasted from some open website anyway.
You have to realize that their business model is marking questions as answered so that they can paywall access and lure people in. This might affect their quality control…
It’s ok, I found a solution to my problem soon afterwards and I think their solution is most likely just some general troubleshooting stuff anyway. I wonder if the original poster even ‘certified’ the solution at all or if that’s just part of the site’s paywall-scheme.
What surprises me is that this site has been doing this for a long time apparently, I always thought putting paywalls in front of everything was more of a web3.0 thing.
No shock there. They have been that way since 2007. It is why the SpiceWorks community took so much.
I used to block search results from that site for this very reason. I don’t seem to ever get anything from them anymore though.
I had never heard of it before coming across this, this is the first time I’ve seen a paywall over what essentially is a forum post
They used to be very big and dominated search results for various technical information, before stackoverflow was a thing. It was so infuriating when the only possible clue to your niche bug was an experts-exchange paywall. And that happened a lot for way too long, after it went bankrupt and was bought by venture capitalists.
I’m so very glad they’re mostly irrelevant now, they made the early 2000’s internet more painful than it needed to be.
How? 🙏 Years back there was an option is Google SERPs to do it… until they removed it 🙄
Using the built in Google option. It was years ago though.
Thanks. I’ll make sure to stay away from there.
Usually it’s shit advice anyway, so it’s not like you’re actually missing out. Of course they want you to think so, wanting your money, but back in the day when this was “expertsexchange” (snrk) evading the paywall was… easy, but still not worth it. That is how shit it was.
Just find better sources: Google has recently been even more blatant about pushing “good for us”-results above “actually good” results, so trying another engine might help, too.
I stopped saying “google it” and started saying “search the internet” when I switch to Qwant.
Qwant is just a bing frontend with a bit better privacy, bit they still share some infos:
Why are you transferring data to Microsoft, and what data is it?
Microsoft provides some of the search results you see on our pages, and provides ads to the keywords in your search inquiry. This means that we need to send Microsoft some information related to your search that allows our partner to return results and ads relevant to that search, and to prevent fraudulent clicks or other activities that are not permitted by our Terms of Use.
In order to detect fraud, Qwant uses a specialized service offered by Microsoft, which does not have access to the keywords of your search. Only your IP address and the browser (your “User Agent”) are communicated to this specialized service to calculate a fraud probability score. Keywords are sent separately to another service that does not know your IP address.
PS: The results are Bing’s so they are biased
That’s true but I preferred their results over ddg when I compared. I might try swisscows again.
It should be illegal to gate content made by users with a registration.
Not the case with Medium, they have, uh, “volunteer” writers. But point stands.
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remembers experts exchange in search results and shudders
Oh yeah, Expert Sex Change! Dunno why it died …
They were so good at sex changes, they finished up.
Probably rubbish scraped from other legitimate sites. These websites are just the worst
“Mildly” infuriating is an understatement, that is downright predatory behavior. Shelling out money you may or may not have in order to find a potential answer to an urgent problem you currently have is high in the list of scumbag moves. In related topics, why does the same thing happen often in regards to mental health support online?
I was trying to get an answer to my math homework then got banned from the website for solving their captcha too fast
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Redhat does this as well a loaf. And even when logged in. A ton of awnsers you need a active subscription for.
The Redhat site really makes me angry sometimes. This is in the ‘going to write me a mini-van’ territory (that is a Dilbert quote, not sure if that works anymore). Write annoying things into your product and put the answers behind paywalls.
