
Show HN: Read any story on Medium for free - swapagarwal
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mediumship/bmiaaebehjjikccjanedpidhmpcbhnfg
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Spivak
The short story of how this works.

\- Take an arbitrary article as an example: [https://medium.com/popular-
science/twitter-is-killing-its-te...](https://medium.com/popular-
science/twitter-is-killing-its-terrible-mac-app-here-are-your-options-for-
replacing-it-58d900b2ac8)

\- Extract the article id 58d900b2ac8.

\- Hit the url medium.com/p/58d900b2ac8/notes which returns a JSON-ish object.

\- Find the webCanonicalUrl. In our case it looks like
"webCanonicalUrl":"[https://www.popsci.com/twitter-mac-app-dead-applications-
rep...](https://www.popsci.com/twitter-mac-app-dead-applications-
replacements?dom=rss-default&src=syn")

\- Go to that instead.

Neat trick.

Edit: Medium appears to have caused webCanonicalURL to always be empty in
response to this.

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chatmasta
Wait, since when do posts on medium cost money? I haven’t encountered a
paywall other than one encouraging me to log in. But I do vaguely remember an
announcement by medium regarding charging for articles and revenue sharing
with authors. Have they implemented this?

~~~
aynsof
It looks like they've been phasing it in. This is from March last year:
[https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/22/medium-debuts-its-paid-
mem...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/22/medium-debuts-its-paid-membership-
subscription-program/)

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WA
I don’t like it. It’s clearly against the intended use of Medium.

IMHO, if you don’t want a paywall, you either pay for the product or leave the
website.

~~~
Spivak
I don't think this particular implementation is unethical. It's not bypassing
the paywall so much as it's querying Medium for another site where the article
is published and probably isn't paywalled. No different than Googling the
article title and finding the original.

For content owned originally published by Medium you're on their regular free
trial system.

