
Show HN: Make Medium Readable Again - thebaer
https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA
======
alekratz
Makes me think of Kill Sticky [0], a small Javascript thing that attempts to
remove all sticky headers on a page.

But really, any sort of thing that blocks, as the Github README says,
"annoying, user-hostile software", is a good piece of software in my book.

[0] [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-
headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

~~~
virtualized
What the hell is a "bookmark bar"? That's the first thing that goes away when
I configure a browser. It's like a permanent sticky header.

~~~
flyinghamster
I put folders of bookmarks there, rather than keeping dozens of tabs open.

~~~
DiThi
For the most frequently used links, I have them outside folders but rename
them to 1-4 letters or none if the icon is distinct enough.

------
Aardwolf
Hacker news is easier to read on mobile than many so called made for mobile
sites. It's as if made for mobile means: "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"

While IMHO mobile optimized should mean: wrap the text automatically at the
width of the screen, in a readable size in portrait mode, don't hide anything
that's visible on the desktop site (like dates, user comments, version
history, ...), and support zooming in in a sane way

Even Wikipedia fails at showing the user comments pages and sane zooming in of
pictures (it's always those sticky bars that ruin it)

~~~
virtualized
Most "mobile" versions of web sites are objectively worse than their "desktop"
versions.

Actual advantages of mobile devices are:

* High DPI, handheld. You can look at a mobile screen from different distances for different use cases and screen contents.

* Less eye movement required than for using a typical HD desktop monitor. This makes it easier to navigate unknown applications / web sites.

* Easier to tap anywhere than to click anywhere with a mouse.

* 360° scrolling with high accuracy and intuitive control over the velocity.

* Zooming with quick and intuitive gestures.

Mobile devices are perfect for navigating wide, complex web sites. That's why
"mobile" versions that ignore the advantages of mobile devices are usually
worse than the desktop versions.

How "mobile-optimized" apps / web sites often fail:

* Overly large elements and fonts that cannot be zoomed out from. High DPI goes to waste.

* Fixed elements that obscure parts of the screen. They make the scrollable area so tiny that you have to move your eye balls quickly when scrolling.

* Hiding important elements in hamburger menus or making them inaccessible. Finding stuff has to require multiple taps so that it is even slower than with a mouse.

* Horizontal scrolling is evil except in awfully implemented code snippets. It is unimaginable to the modern web developer that someone would double-tap a column of text to read it and scroll around afterwards to discover what else the site has to offer.

* Vertical scrolling is too hard even though a touchscreen is perfect for that. All the "important" shit has to be fixed because users would be too stupid to find the menu by scrolling. A fixed "back to top" button is the icing on the modern web cake.

* Zooming is too hard so it should be better disabled, bugged or useless.

~~~
arkh
> * Easier to tap anywhere than to click anywhere with a mouse. > * 360°
> scrolling with high accuracy and intuitive control over the velocity. > *
> Zooming with quick and intuitive gestures.

I disagree about those. "taping" lack a lot of precision a mouse has. And
don't get me started on the typing experience as you can't use all your
fingers and have no tactile return. Also Ctrl-F "the thing I'm looking for"
anyone ?

The intuitive gestures are all but intuitive if you have never used them
before. My first reflex to zoom is sure not to move diagonally 2 fingers on a
picture.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
On iOS you can put find in page in the bottom row of the screen that pops up
when you hit the share button. I also put request desktop site there for easy
access (although I recently accidentally discovered that that's available by
long pressing the reload button.)

~~~
benjaminjackman
Long pressing the reload button ... wow ... yep it does that. I wonder: Is
there some site that just lists all the different tricks for mobile safari in
a list?

I feel like I am 8 again bombing random walls / burning random trees in Zelda
looking for a super secret fabled (atleast in my grade school) green potion of
unlimited refills when I'm using iOS safari half the time.

Also, I feel like double tapping the address bar used to scroll to the top of
the page too but it seems like it doesn't do that anymore so showing what was
ninja patched out would be useful too.

~~~
saagarjha
On iOS, tapping the middle of the status bar will scroll up to the top.

------
userbinator
It's amazing how many sites, Medium included, become so much more readable
just by turning off CSS and JavaScript.

Sure, they look far more bland and become less interactive, but I came for the
content and not the author's idea of "design".

~~~
WalterSear
Contemporary design is overly focused on curb appeal. IMHO, it's an
understated problem.

IMHO, the cause is a combination of commercialism and of visual designers
being inculcated with inappropriate values and training from traditional print
design.

~~~
ashark
> IMHO, the cause is a combination of commercialism and of visual designers
> being inculcated with inappropriate values and training from traditional
> print design.

I judge that it got a lot worse around the time the print-trained designers
started to be pushed out of decision-making positions by the digital-trained
ones.

~~~
WalterSear
I'm not sure I follow. Web design hasn't gone downhill over time - it's
definitely improving, simply because the tools have allowed it do so. Perhaps
you could provide some examples from the era of print designers and the era
after them?

What I have observed has been that, while technology has allowed screens to
become a more expressive design medium, visual designers tend to be content to
cargo-cult techniques from the static, vastly simpler, and more expansive
medium of print, and it shows.

~~~
ashark
I think we probably disagree about what good design is. I think that precisely

> static, vastly simpler

is the right way to go.

This is mere consistency on my part. I hated (most) Flash sites back in the
day, and wasteful giant images, et c. I hate (most) JS/CSS cycle-burner sites
and giant wasteful images today. Consistency is good. Shit not moving around
on my screen is good. Controls working the usual way is good. Consistency,
predictability, and clarity _are_ good UX.

The basic 2-or-3-column layout with a thin header was fine, with maybe some
tweaks for smaller screens these days. Early-period web's allergy to non-
content large media files was good. Design mostly gets in the way, while
making everything more expensive. I think its function was described perfectly
by someone the last time we had a design thread: it's peacock feathers.
Keeping up with design trends is harmful to function, but signals wealth
(=stability, reliability, social proof of value) precisely because it's so
costly and pointless. This doesn't mean it improves my experience on the Web.

~~~
WalterSear
_> > static, vastly simpler_

 _> is the right way to go._

Right, and this is the problem. Digital information is frequently neither.
Denying this and shoehorning it into techniques that work for simpler, more
static information is hiding the message for the medium. It's bad design.

>The basic 2-or-3-column layout with a thin header was fine, with maybe some
tweaks for smaller screens these days. Early-period web's allergy to non-
content large media files was good. Design mostly gets in the way, while
making everything more expensive.

This wasn't because print designers were in charge. It's because the design
industry, for the most part, is allergic to innovation and was ignoring the
web. The web designers weren't designers - they very junior developers with
none of the pretensions or preconceptions that come with formal training as
well as all the problems that come with that, and a really primitive medium.

It's rather telling that returning to those pre-css days would improve things,
is it not?

------
boramalper
You can also use uBlock (or any sufficiently sophisticated ad/content blocker)
to block certain elements just by pointing your pointer at them. See:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-
picker](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker)

~~~
kronos29296
One shouldn't spend 2 minutes blocking elements in a page that you would read
hardly 5 minutes. That's counter productive and annoying and should be
automated. An extension helps in that.

~~~
fmoralesc
The picker creates rules that are persistent, so it would be 2 minutes over
however many times you visit the site. Not too dissimilar to looking for the
extension and installing it.

~~~
passivepinetree
That's what I thought as well, but I repeatedly find myself blocking the same
elements on Medium. Maybe there's some element of randomization in the ids of
the offending elements, or else I'm using the extension wrong and only
creating temporary rules somehow.

------
chrismorgan
This is the sort of thing that is probably typically better handled via a user
stylesheet; one I found from a quick search:
[https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-
bot...](https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bottom-and-
upper-banners)

This extension, however, has the advantage that it checks for a <meta
property="al:ios:app_name" content="Medium"> in the document instead of
applying to a hardcoded set of domains.

~~~
thebaer
Yep, a user stylesheet would easily do the trick. And a nicely-packaged
extension makes it accessible to more people, especially non-technical users.

~~~
O1111OOO
> And a nicely-packaged extension makes it accessible to more people,
> especially non-technical users.

I followed the links on parent comment. Installed _Stylish_ for FF[0] to
manage userStyles. The link provided by parent[1] now shows _install style_ :)

After installing the userStyle, medium is so much more readable as default
without me having to click an extra 'readability' button to reload.

Very nice! I'm going to have a lot of fun experimenting with some other
(annoying) sites.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
Us/firefox/addon/stylish/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
Us/firefox/addon/stylish/)

[1] [https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-
bot...](https://userstyles.org/styles/140923/medium-com-removing-bottom-and-
upper-banners)

------
primitivesuave
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'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's surprising that these problems were not caught
during basic usability testing. Thank you OP for fixing them!

~~~
edoceo
It's not the engineers, it's the managers.

------
pmx
I wish there was something I could do like this on mobile. I've given up
trying to read these pages on my phone now, it's just too distracting to have
all their UI clutter in the way.

What I don't understand is how they let it get this bad?

~~~
gargs
I downloaded this app called 'Unobstruct' the other day. It does just this for
mobile safari.

[https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/unobstruct/id1255281426?l=en...](https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/unobstruct/id1255281426?l=en&mt=8)

~~~
twobyfour
Been looking for something like this for months. Trying it out right now!

------
ynak
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'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?

[0] [https://medium.com/@soleoshao/how-i-used-docker-for-latex-
on...](https://medium.com/@soleoshao/how-i-used-docker-for-latex-on-mac-os-
yosemite-cd29c0713cad)

~~~
MattBearman
The hash at the end of the URL is actually the article ID, the part before
that is just for SEO/readability, and has no affect on loading the article.

e.g.: omitting the article title from the URL still works
([https://medium.com/@soleoshao/cd29c0713cad](https://medium.com/@soleoshao/cd29c0713cad))
as does changing it to something else entirely
([https://medium.com/@soleoshao/i-like-turtles-
cd29c0713cad](https://medium.com/@soleoshao/i-like-turtles-cd29c0713cad))

Both those URLs still load the article in question.

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

~~~
martin-adams
I disagree, the action taken to create an extension and get it on HN sparks
the discussion that can trigger real change. A boycott only works when you
have a sufficient number of people doing the same, or in this case, a
sufficient number of people bypassing the hostile UI.

------
softinio
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

~~~
gnicholas
Yeah, and as a contributor I have been surprised to see that they are now
injecting (neon green) advertising banners into some of my articles. I don't
mind it at the bottom, but I don't love it at the top.

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

~~~
thebaer
How would you like to see it improved?

~~~
qaz_plm
If there was a way to get _all_ of the comments to show inline per their
thread on the main page that would be helpful.

Having to click a link, go to another page, have that page jump around on you
and still need to click another link to show the replies is pretty terrible.

Here's a GIF of my gripe: [http://imgur.com/a/35YJs](http://imgur.com/a/35YJs)

------
JoshMnem
I'm waiting for "Show HN: How to blog with a static site generator". Medium is
getting to be too much. If you'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.

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

~~~
kentt
Absolutely horrible for readability. Nothing makes me give up on an article
faster.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've written some ... spicy ... emails to _The New York Times_ over this
practice.

I tend to go to a W3M dump instead.

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

~~~
CM30
Yep. That seems to be a trend with user content driven sites. They start off
promising a clean, minimalistic look (like Medium, Imgur, Reddit, etc) and
then gradually end up cluttering their site with more and more useless
trinkets.

Indeed, it's so bad for image sharing sites that they seem to get replaced
every year or two when the last one starts becoming more and more hostile
towards their users' experience.

~~~
irq-1
"Brands" generally follow the same pattern: grow the base, then cheapen the
products to increase profits. Eventually the Brand will be replaced with the
next big thing, or the Brand will survive long enough to provide a consistent
product that people accept.

------
luke3butler
Userscript Version:
[https://gist.github.com/luke3butler/3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2...](https://gist.github.com/luke3butler/3ff89de4fb6564669eaa50d2b04dd49c)

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

~~~
cJ0th
I'said it before, I'll say it again:

ctrl+alt+r

However, while it is lovely when it does work, it crashes my browser rather
often.

------
ghostly_s
I for one am shocked, _shocked_ , that independent publishers colluded with a
single company in establishing a near-monopoly in hosted content delivery
because of their "publisher-friendly policies" and said company is now taking
advantage of that position.

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

~~~
Myztiq
I had the same problem. Found this:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/medium-
highlight-o...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/medium-highlight-
off/lfhbdbplpphacepapppdobnenkfimagn)

------
thinkMOAR
(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.

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

------
aembleton
Does anyone have a problem with Medium on Firefox? For me, it doesn't have the
top and bottom bars. I've switched uBlock off and this is still the case. Is
all of this extra chrome, a Chrome only thing or some A/B testing?

I do see the problems on Chrome.

[https://medium.com/@andrey_cheptsov/making-java-code-
easier-...](https://medium.com/@andrey_cheptsov/making-java-code-easier-to-
read-without-changing-it-adeebd5c36de)

~~~
jplatte
I see them in Firefox, with uBlock installed and active. This problem is
easily solved by clicking the reader mode button in the url bar though.

------
santa_boy
Thank you. Just FYI ... I use the [Mercury Reader
Extension]([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-
reader/okn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-
reader/oknpjjbmpnndlpmnhmekjpocelpnlfdi)) which works fantastic!

An added benefit, is its ability to send the article to my Kindle to read
later at leisure.

------
odammit
One of my favorite things about Medium posts is the completely irrelevant hi
res image that they nag you to add.

Definitely contributes to the story. Clap clap clap.

------
kentt
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).

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-
read/dgmanlpm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-
read/dgmanlpmmkibanfdgjocnabmcaclkmod?hl=en)

------
dimillian
I don'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.
[https://blog.mindorks.com/understanding-interpolators-in-
and...](https://blog.mindorks.com/understanding-interpolators-in-android-
ce4e8d1d71cd)

Am I on some sort of special version?

~~~
rovek
You must be on some sort of special version. Scrolling provides me with an
additional social bar and removes nothing

~~~
thebaer
You'll get a different (less annoying) experience if you're logged in. However
if you haven't logged in on a Medium site (these [0][1] might be some), you'll
get the annoying sticky bars.

[0] [https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-influencers-in-a-
digital-...](https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-influencers-in-a-digital-
age-28c251df4018) [1] [https://imrat.com/medium-custom-domain-cloudflare-
db76b8a9b2...](https://imrat.com/medium-custom-domain-cloudflare-db76b8a9b284)

------
pmlnr
Firefox -> URL bar -> click ::book icon:: -> read.

EDIT. Huh. No astral plane unicode allowed in HN comments.

------
OverThere
Wow. Thanks for creating this awesome tool. I've felt the same for a long
time.

------
cabalamat
I use Kill Sticky for this: [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-
headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

------
edwinyzh
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.

------
asdffdsa321
Thought this was referring to the decline of its content at first

------
Rjevski
It'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).

------
namuol
Dear web designers:

Tall screen? Use a topbar.

Wide screen? Use a sidebar.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'd actually strongly encourage using a _non-fixed_ set of _bottom_ navigation
in most instances.

I'm increasingly finding sidebars ... bad.

------
talles
It's me getting old and grumpy or was it really better back in the days of
Greasemonkey?

------
gkya
What are the alternatives to Medium?

~~~
CM30
Static website generators and GitHub pages, WordPress.com, Blogger, typical
hosting sites. I think some forums and Reddit style link aggregators have
places for longform content too.

I was considering my own direct alternative to the site, but at the moment I
have other things to work on.

~~~
gkya
AFAIK Medium's selling point is the network, i.e. the easy access to potential
followers. My website is static via org-publish, but nobody knows it and if I
wanted to popularise it I'd have to do many things. With these
networks+hosting services like Medium and Tumblr all you have to do is put
some tags. I was asking for this sort of alternatives.

~~~
CM30
Then I'll say that I'm working on something similar, it's just not ready at
the moment. I'm retooling my gaming site into a gaming alternative to Medium
and the likes, and will hopefully launch a general version for all subjects at
a later date.

------
Tick2Time
It seems to be commonly regarded that Medium has the most excremental reading
experience of any publishing platform.

Remember when they used to publish blog articles about making the web a better
reading experience? That seems a bad joke now.

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's going on?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
> do they know?

Maybe

> Do they care?

Sure, if they know.

> Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on
> their platform is?

Doubtful

>What's going on?

They don't know how to monetize any better than any other web site. They're
following what other sites do to try and engage the people who do visit Medium
longer. The problem is, what works for sites where the reading experience is
secondary doesn't work for a site whose reading experience is primary. Somehow
they either don't know that or cannot think of anything better to try.

~~~
true_religion
They're probably seeing an uptick in signups, subscriptions, and all the other
metrics they care about---so they keep going down the rabbit hole of adding
more modals and call to actions, and popunders. They don't realize at the end
of that track is a brick wall of 0% growth as new visitors are instantly
turned off.

If I werent' already committed to using Medium, I'd click away the instant I
saw the site as it reminds me too much of spam-blog pages.

~~~
carapace
I just reached the point of "ew, no" when I'm about to click a link that I can
see is going to go to Medium due to the popups that start, "You've read N
articles on Medium, ..."

I can't recall what the rest says because by the time I've scanned the first
part I've already right-clicked to "inspect" to delete the element. (Then I
cleared all Medium cookies, but that doesn't prevent them from showing the
popup again, and it still has the N so obviously they are storing it server-
side. :-( )

Bleah.

------
aloukissas
Stop. Using. "Make X Y/Great Again". Headlines.

Thanks,

Pretty much everybody

~~~
blackrose
The formula works! If it can get _that_ guy in the White House, it can sell
_anything_.

Also, I think it's kind of delicious when a variant like this is used to
actually describe a previously "Y/Great" thing (Medium _was_ readable at some
point). Kinda hijacks the meaning from the original phrase and makes it less
shitty.

------
kristerv
thank you...

------
_pmf_
Basically every online newspaper is much, much worse than Medium. I don't get
all the whining.

