Fuck Medium.

Fuck their dickbars. Their randomized CSS names. Them putting things behind a paywall, and claiming that membership “is an optional subscription that is not required in order to read and write.” And most of all, them suggesting that you can continue to read an article after signing up for an account, only to make you find out that you will need to pay for this anyway. Their model for measuring writers’ earnings based on the time of readers spend reading.

And sincerely, fuck the naivety from writers who just assume they can someday make big money from writing a “Publication” on Medium. The “writers” who create shitty, meme-infused content. Those who have decent content but rather let it rot on Medium. Those who share code with screenshots or by using GitHub hosted iframes that allow 46 monospace characters per line.

Have even an ounce of character. Spend a few bucks your content deserves. Go put your writings on Wordpress, Ghost Pro, or Microblog.

Fuck Medium: The How-to

Enough with the rants. Let’s look at how to read on Medium.com without dickbars forever.

Option 1 is “Incognito Mode.”

Medium, as of August 2020, allows you to read three articles for free without signing up for an account. Without an account, Medium uses your browser’s cookies to remember how many “free articles” you have left.

Incognito Mode will clear the cookies for each session (a.k.a. each browser window or tab), essentially making websites have no memories of the users. Have an article to check out but ran out of free articles? Just copy and paste the link to a browser window in Incognito Mode. On your Mac, just hit ⌘⇧N in Safari or Chrome¹.

Option 2 is content blockers.

I use 1Blocker on my Mac, iPhone and iPad. It has great control with website-based blocking rules. Just spin up a custom rule for medium.com to block all the cookies, and Medium will essentially have no memories of who you are. Every time you will see an article you will see that “You have 2 free stories left this month.” Fantastic.

This post was updated to reduce four letter words by 70%. Some sentences were rephrased for clarity.