I can't be the only one who has been locked out of Medium because I click on interesting titles on HN and quickly reach my limit. I don't want to upgrade Medium, I don't want to pay to get past paywalls.
Isn't this a solved issue, dead horse, decided discussion, etc.? This comes up on every paywalled article.<p>These sites sometimes have interesting content so we allow them to be posted. Some great pieces are written by very established news papers with skilled career journalists. Many members pay for these sites, others often post workarounds. Why automatically ignore all the paywalled sites that may in fact contain high quality content? If such articles are so truly unpopular then they won't make frontpage, can't that filter be sufficient enough?
I build a FF add-on for my self that applies CSS styles to elements with text or attribute values matching a regular expression to solve exactly this issue, for exactly these sites, plus a bunch more. My HN looks like this [1] and, no matter where I go on the internet, links to those sites are never even given a chance to lure me in.<p>[1] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/Xo4k5Sj.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Xo4k5Sj.png</a>
You're not the only one. I always check the article source. I never click on Medium or WP, although I can read NYT using my wife's subscription.
There's others too, sites are getting more aggressive about demanding money. As far as I'm concerned, there are very few sites I'm willng to subscribe to.
I subscribed to NYT based on the number of interesting articles that get posted here and their consistently high quality.<p>I won't subscribe to Medium because the quality is very spotty, but I don't mind stories getting linked here. I can check the link first, and it doesn't ruin my day when I hit my Medium limit. If they don't want me seeing their content I'm happy not to waste my time on their site.
I have a WaPo account, started paying for their journalism in 2016. But I typically don't click Medium or NYT links. I'll click NYT links more than Medium because they're generally higher quality.
I use temporary containers in firefox. I also have gripe that most of the articles in Medium are non-archivable so I have no way of knowing if the articles I find useful will be available next year.
I've gotten around this by disabling cookies and javascript on a per site basis.<p>These sites require blocking both javascript and cookies:
NYT, Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, Wired, National Geographic and LA Times<p>These sites require only blocking cookies:
Medium, Scientific American, Quartz, The Atlantic, Bloomberg and Harvard Business Review<p>The one downside is when the linked article is an "interactive feature/story" and it's a site which requires blocking javascript. It's an annoyance to temporarily allow such an article's source, but I'd rather have to deal with that than reaching their "free limit".<p>I'd much prefer if submitters choose more user-respecting sources, but until then I refuse to feel guilty over stopping these intrusive sites and their dark patterns.<p>The only source I wish was permanently banned is Financial Times -- every article is paywalled and provides no snippet.
I like free stuff too, but I like ad-free experiences even more. I feel I have to support an imperfect alternative, rather than let everything become ad financed. That said, I am unwilling - and frankly unable - to subscribe to every media that occasionally posts quality content. So, for soft paywalls I occasionally use outline.com, and hard paywalls I just ignore.<p>Maybe there is a business in creating groupbuys for subs. A humblebundle for subscribtion media.
If you must post Medium links, at least post them from a twitter account to save the step of bypassing the paywall<p><a href="https://lifehacker.com/how-to-read-medium-articles-for-free-1840047253" rel="nofollow">https://lifehacker.com/how-to-read-medium-articles-for-free-...</a>