gemini://gerikson.com/gemlog/lobsters-drafts/On-Medium.gmi

I downvoted this comment as “incorrect” but I have since reconsidered and removed my downvote.

I initially read the comment to mean “never discuss anything political, (as defined by us the community\*) on this site”.

I know hope it reads “please feel free to discuss things political, but the focus should be on the technical contents of the submitted post”.

In this spirit, I will submit a comment that both reflects my opinion on the linked content, and will serve as a template for an acceptable comment that also addresses the political/ethical implications.

If anyone upvotes or downvotes this comment, please let me know if it was because of the content, or the presentation, or the meta-narrative on how to handle political/ethical/sensitive submissions to the site.

This project strikes me as useful for now, but ultimately reactive. It’s easy for Medium to redesign their site to defeat the circumvention, and the developer and users will engage in a game of whack-a-mole to keep up.

It’s a similar situation with ad blockers, with the significant difference that the market for ad-free browsing is much larger than the market for reading Medium without a bunch of banners.

This segues nicely into the problems with Medium’s business plan. Ultimately, it’s just Wordpress.com with a nicer editor and draconian rules about CSS. There’s really no reason to pay for Medium apart from the *content*, and the content, for me personally, seems mostly to be cryptocurrency boosters nowadays. Essentially it’s content as a commodity… there has to be a critical mass of writers *who are only available on Medium* for it to be worth paying for.

If Medium promised a cleaner reading experience as part of a paid tier, that would maybe help?

As to the name of the linked project - it’s unfortunately hard to detect irony on the web, and considering the “alt-right” has had some success in shifting the conversation by “pretending” to be racist, saying it’s for the “lulz”, I am prepared to automatically assume that someone who seems to do the same is either on the same side as this political faction, or insensitive to how they appear by choosing this name.

Personally I would add the name choice as a negative in evaluating this project.

\* who represents this community is another question that deserves discussion but that’s for another time.

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About this category: “Sometimes I post to lobste.rs, sometimes I write angry rants that end up here but not there”

The occasional geminer - an artisanal, handcrafted gemlog

On Medium