Hey there,
This will be a short post but I want to get this off my chest :).
Most of the articles I write over her are also cross-posted in other places for findability. Mostly on dev.to, sometimes on Linkedin or Medium.
Of all of those, Medium is by far the worst thing I can experience as a user. The reason is simple : Medium is the new Pinterest of the internet. I don't have anything against paywalling, nor do I have anything against getting paid for your work either. However, I really hate that when you search for something and find results on Medium, you never know up front whether the content will be paywalled or not.
This is the typical thing I see on Medium every day now :
You can't read this because you don't pay us money every month
On top of this, just like Pinterest with images, Medium started blocking access to articles for anonymous users :
I am blocking you because you are not logged in
And even if you manage to read an article, over half of the suggested articles proposed under will be paywalled themselves :
4 of those stories are paywalled for me. can you guess which?
If you are developer like me, you probably start noticing that Medium is slowly taking first place over Stack Overflow in the search results.
Here are a couple examples :
- Npm dependency branch : Medium scores first, followed by Stack Overflow. The documentation comes 4th.
Searching for NPM dependency branch
- Npm deploy Github React : Dev.to first, then Medium (paywalled), and then the docs
Searching for NPM deploy github react
As it stands now, about 20% of my daily searches end up with a Medium result in the top 3 that is paywalled.
It think we have enough ads showing up in search results those days to on top of that have paywalled content appear like organic search. Especially as developers, we can do better.
I already actively refuse to open Medium articles that pop up in my results. Now I am also seriously considering stop publishing on the platform. I suggest you do too.
I sponsor projects and folks I believe in on multiple platforms. I also buy books and am happy to pay for courses from content creators that bring me value. However, I surely will not pay monthly for a service whose job is to crap out my search results and take me hostage.
If you have other thoughts or ideas, feel free to hit me up on Twitter!
EDIT : Jordy suggested to make a default filtered search to hide Medium from search results. A very good idea :).
Turns out you can do this easily (this is for DuckDuckGo but it will work for all search engines :)). In the search settings from your favourite browser, filter out Medium by creating a query that removes the results coming from that website! (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=-site%3Amedium.com+%s)
Cheers!