Show HN: Make Medium Readable Again

Makes me think of Kill Sticky [0], a small Javascript thing that attempts to remove all sticky headers on a page.<p>But really, any sort of thing that blocks, as the Github README says, &quot;annoying, user-hostile software&quot;, is a good piece of software in my book.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alisdair.mcdiarmid.org&#x2F;kill-sticky-headers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alisdair.mcdiarmid.org&#x2F;kill-sticky-headers&#x2F;</a>

Hacker news is easier to read on mobile than many so called made for mobile sites. It&#x27;s as if made for mobile means: &quot;abuse the small mobile screen to show as much as possible spammy bars and social network buttons on it and make them even bigger when you zoom in, while hiding actually relevant information that you can see on the desktop version of the site&quot;<p>While IMHO mobile optimized should mean: wrap the text automatically at the width of the screen, in a readable size in portrait mode, don&#x27;t hide anything that&#x27;s visible on the desktop site (like dates, user comments, version history, ...), and support zooming in in a sane way<p>Even Wikipedia fails at showing the user comments pages and sane zooming in of pictures (it&#x27;s always those sticky bars that ruin it)

It&#x27;s amazing how many sites, Medium included, become so much more readable just by turning off CSS and JavaScript.<p>Sure, they look far more bland and become less interactive, but I came for the content and not the author&#x27;s idea of &quot;design&quot;.

You can also use uBlock (or any sufficiently sophisticated ad&#x2F;content blocker) to block certain elements just by pointing your pointer at them. See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Element-picker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Element-picker</a>

This is the sort of thing that is probably typically better handled via a user stylesheet; one I found from a quick search: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;userstyles.org&#x2F;styles&#x2F;140923&#x2F;medium-com-removing-bottom-and-upper-banners" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;userstyles.org&#x2F;styles&#x2F;140923&#x2F;medium-com-removing-bot...</a><p>This extension, however, has the advantage that it checks for a &lt;meta property=&quot;al:ios:app_name&quot; content=&quot;Medium&quot;&gt; in the document instead of applying to a hardcoded set of domains.

This is awesome and will hopefully prod the developers at Medium to rethink the design (if your users need a Chrome extension to make your product usable, it&#x27;s got some immediate problems that deserve a resolution). The sticky nav bars are really just terrible, and sometimes render parts of the page completely unreadable. It&#x27;s surprising that these problems were not caught during basic usability testing. Thank you OP for fixing them!

I wish there was something I could do like this on mobile. I&#x27;ve given up trying to read these pages on my phone now, it&#x27;s just too distracting to have all their UI clutter in the way.<p>What I don&#x27;t understand is how they let it get this bad?

A bit off topic, but why does Medium add random numbers and chars at the end of their URLs like the example below[0]? That&#x27;s annoying and distracting when referring from other platforms. Is that a git hash or something? If so, can I check revise history of the article?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@soleoshao&#x2F;how-i-used-docker-for-latex-on-mac-os-yosemite-cd29c0713cad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@soleoshao&#x2F;how-i-used-docker-for-latex-on...</a>

While I applaud the effort, I think you should vote with your X button and stop reading articles that have a hostile UI.

Funny thing is I avoid reading hackernoon blogs because of the green banner hurting my eyes. Not trying to be funny but I genuinely find it uncomfortable. So interesting that in the README file of this project hackernoon is shown as the example lol

Anything to help make the comment section of Medium more usable?

I&#x27;m waiting for &quot;Show HN: How to blog with a static site generator&quot;. Medium is getting to be too much. If you&#x27;re a programmer, at least use a static site generator (Metalsmith, Hugo, Hexo, etc.). You can deploy to Github pages with git or via drag-and-drop to a service like Netlify.

A possible improvement: automatically remove all the f-ing animated gifs people think they really really must insert in between each paragraph.

Remember the good old days, when Medium prided itself on being beautiful and readable?

Userscript Version: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;luke3butler&#x2F;3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2b04dd49c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;luke3butler&#x2F;3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2...</a>

I use Firefox in reader mode. Works like a charm. Firefox mobile also has this feature which has become indispensable for me.

I for one am shocked, <i>shocked</i>, that independent publishers colluded with a single company in establishing a near-monopoly in hosted content delivery because of their &quot;publisher-friendly policies&quot; and said company is now taking advantage of that position.

Does this kill the share on highlight crap? If so, you have another install.

(in my humble opinion) they should just as much look at the content they publish as how they publish it. The amount of clickbait quality articles on medium is sky rocket high.

This has slowly been driving me insane. I will for sure use this. I&#x27;d think the bars would be common criticisms and medium would have done something to limit them by now.

Does anyone have a problem with Medium on Firefox? For me, it doesn&#x27;t have the top and bottom bars. I&#x27;ve switched uBlock off and this is still the case. Is all of this extra chrome, a Chrome only thing or some A&#x2F;B testing?<p>I do see the problems on Chrome.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@andrey_cheptsov&#x2F;making-java-code-easier-to-read-without-changing-it-adeebd5c36de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@andrey_cheptsov&#x2F;making-java-code-easier-...</a>

Thank you. Just FYI ... I use the [Mercury Reader Extension](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;mercury-reader&#x2F;oknpjjbmpnndlpmnhmekjpocelpnlfdi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;mercury-reader&#x2F;okn...</a>) which works fantastic!<p>An added benefit, is its ability to send the article to my Kindle to read later at leisure.

One of my favorite things about Medium posts is the completely irrelevant hi res image that they nag you to add.<p>Definitely contributes to the story. Clap clap clap.

I use Just Read[1] for things like this. It attempts to pull out the relevant text and put it in a user editable style sheet (the default is fine for many).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;just-read&#x2F;dgmanlpmmkibanfdgjocnabmcaclkmod?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;just-read&#x2F;dgmanlpm...</a>

I don&#x27;t see how it can be useful. Here for example, I just have to scroll a little (little) bit and all the bar are gone. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mindorks.com&#x2F;understanding-interpolators-in-android-ce4e8d1d71cd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mindorks.com&#x2F;understanding-interpolators-in-and...</a><p>Am I on some sort of special version?

Firefox -&gt; URL bar -&gt; click ::book icon:: -&gt; read.<p>EDIT. Huh. No astral plane unicode allowed in HN comments.

Wow. Thanks for creating this awesome tool. I&#x27;ve felt the same for a long time.

I use Kill Sticky for this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alisdair.mcdiarmid.org&#x2F;kill-sticky-headers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alisdair.mcdiarmid.org&#x2F;kill-sticky-headers&#x2F;</a>

Is there anything like this for Gmail? The two large sticky bars (the bar where the search box is on, and the toolbar bar) are wasting too much of my screen estate. Thanks in advance.

Thought this was referring to the decline of its content at first

It&#x27;s really sad to see Medium turning into this. I used to like Medium, now I avoid any site that uses them (which is getting harder as they now allow custom domains).

Dear web designers:<p>Tall screen? Use a topbar.<p>Wide screen? Use a sidebar.

It&#x27;s me getting old and grumpy or was it really better back in the days of Greasemonkey?

What are the alternatives to Medium?

It seems to be commonly regarded that Medium has the most excremental reading experience of any publishing platform.<p>Remember when they used to publish blog articles about making the web a better reading experience? That seems a bad joke now.<p>So Medium have trashed their brand. But my question is: do they know? Do they care? Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? What&#x27;s going on?

Stop. Using. &quot;Make X Y&#x2F;Great Again&quot;. Headlines.<p>Thanks,<p>Pretty much everybody

thank you...

Basically every online newspaper is much, much worse than Medium. I don&#x27;t get all the whining.