Maybe remove the controvesial from your sentence? Its a nearly universally heard campaign slogan and has been riffed on all sides of the political spectrum. Including many democratic institutions trying to ride the popularity of the phrase.
Why would would someone want to censor themselves just because people they don't like want a monopoly on language? Is acting in a milquetoast manner attempting the broadest appeal more important than having common sense and integrity?
> Why would would someone want to censor themselves just because people they don't like want a monopoly on language?
All effective communication is "censoring yourself". When I say that I'm a software engineer, I'm refusing to say that I'm a kazoo player, because I intend to convey the idea that people get when they hear "I'm a software engineer" and not the idea that people get when they hear "I'm a kazoo player." No matter how much I dislike (or like) kazoo players, I'm not going to attempt to reclaim the term from them.
And the English language is descriptive, not prescriptive. When a phrase has a well-established meaning - whether that meaning was first by commoners 400 years ago, or commoners today, or (for some languages) a bunch of academics in an ivory tower today - people are going to think I mean that meaning when I use the phrase. If I want my communication to be effective, it's on me to pick words that I expect people will understand, not on my audience to figure out what I really meant.
When I communicate, I intend to communicate the most accurate thing I can to, yes, the broadest audience I can.
I'm not saying self-censorship is bad, I'm saying that if you do it because someone else misappropriated some language, then you're on a clear path to only saying what other people permit. And this is especially wrong when those 'other people' are actively trying to undermine your ability to communicate.
To avoid the risk of this entirely predictable meta-discussion regarding a headline format, that has little to do with the readability of Medium, but was probably chosen to try and increase clickthrough rates?
Well, yes, and the people who use "Make America Great Again" generally believe that their proposals are actually a solution to an actual problem of America being no longer great.
It seems to me that if you want to convey that you disagree with those people or their assumptions, using their snowclone to describe a tool that actually solves a problem that arose recently is counterproductive. If I wanted to convey disagreement, I might release a tool called, say, "Make HN Readable Again" that added a bunch of slow JavaScript and popups. (And if I wanted to convey neither agreement or disagreement, I'd pick a different name.)
I refuse to let a simple phrase like that become verboten just because a certain configuration of it was used by someone that our circles of friends dislike. Personally, I think it’s a funny reappropriation.
But either way, this isn’t particularly germane to the conversation, and you could even argue that it wasn’t done intentionally considering that Medium used to be readable.
Anyway, Medium is annoyingly hard to read now, and I’m glad someone’s done something to fix it.
>just because a certain configuration of it was used by someone that our circles of friends dislike.
I'm going to stand on the side of this issue and argue it's more than that the configuration of "Make X Y Again" was used by people circles of my friends dislike, it was a rallying call, a point of campaigning, to cause a deliberate division of people at the expense of individuals whose mere presence makes America less than great according to some-on deeply superficial grounds.
But yes, not really relevant to the discussion.
I will ask this though: In what ways is Medium difficult to read? Personally speaking it's one of the easiest sites to read, just curious what that experience is like for other people, clearly it's pronounced enough for someone to make a browser extension. Just wondering.
Edit:
I do hate the amount of clicking that has to go on just to read "Network" responses, however.
I like this title as it’s short and sweet. Actually, most threads in HN have negative messages such as this on.
Every single thread. Some new kid makes a small little app and it gets crushed with someone pointing out - usually obvious - short comings or how unnecessary it is. Let’s all be supportive for once.
Not saying OP is not supportive; OP is just communicating their frustration. Just using OP as a conduit to explain the pattern I usually see.
I've gotten so used to right clicking and removing the offensive parts of websites in ublock origin that I always find it shocking just how bad the web is on a new machine. So many banners, so many subscription lists, so many useless social bars.
It's also kind of silly that I have four different extensions just to shield myself from how bad the web has gotten. I feel like I'm going under red alert every time I want to check my email.
Does it? Does anyone just go to medium.com and see what's going on rather than being linked to some specific article? Is there anything about the medium reading experience that means someone would rather go to them specifically rather than where the content they want happens to be? Are they trying to lure writers that way? I don't get it.
I mean, I'm sure they know their business and everything. Again: I don't get it.
Well, that's the incentive for Medium to do it. Only they would know whether it works or not. It sticking around suggests it does. However, success hides all problems.
I like this plugin. Thanks. I do not like the recent “pivot” if oh will of medium allowing branding etc. It’s not executed perfectly; though I do not have a better solution in mind.
View->Page Style->No Style usually works for me. Obviously pages become a lot more bland and...style-less, but the text and images I'm usually after will still be there.
Without reading the source, I reckon this is because not all Medium blogs are under medium.com subdomains, so you can't request access only to *.medium.com in the extension manifest.
This is the reason. The code does look for a specific appname that is present on all medium blogs before running the code. If this were a closed source extension I would worry about it, but since it's open source you can verify it's not doing anything malicious. That said, I think I will copy the source and turn it into a user script so I don't have to install another extension.
However, Chrome will automatically update the extension.
Things that could go wrong:
* The author could wake up in a bad mood one day and decide to push a malicious update.
* The author's computer could be compromised, and someone could steal the signing keys and publish a malicious version of the extension.
* The author could get bored of the extension and transfer ownership to someone who offers to maintain it for them, but who turns out to be malicious.
* The author could be in need of some cash and could decide to accept one of the many offers they no doubt get from shady parties to buy their extension.
I'm sure the author of this extension would never do any of these things... but I'm not sure enough to risk it. :/
Open/close source is not going to help you here: nothing stops a malicious author from publishing one version open source while publishing the malicious one.
The only way to find out is to run the extension in Chrome and inspect it with the debugger.
Extensions that do this terrify me. Imagine a popular Chrome extension, say, Fireshot, with 2 million active installs, selling out. The next update of the app gets shipped with a screen scraper that looks at coinbase.com. Some time after you've last visited your dashboard, it opens a connection on some entirely unrelated site and posts to the 'send' page to send all of your BTC to a third party address.
Or if you have 2FA enabled for sends, just intercept the send POST with an address of your choice, but display the user's originally input address on the confirmation screen. To make it even more confusing, keep a list of transactions:intended accounts so any time the user looks on _any_ bitcoin site it shows the transaction was going to the right account.
You can set a flag on Chrome (chrome://flags/#extension-active-script-permission) to block the extension by default and only activate it when you click the pageAction/browserAction or if you whitelist it (for that website only or for all websites).
Also, two extensions come in handy: "Chrome extension source viewer" [1] and "Extensions Update Notifier" [2] (self-descriptive titles). The second one can automatically disable extensions when they're updated.
They're honestly a little annoying if you have more than a handful of extensions since they lack some essential features (e.g. viewing a code diff from the previous version), but at least they're open source! :)
It was a StackOverflow question he posted while creating Silk Road, in which he used his real name (before switching to the "frosty" alias in under a minute).
And his SSH key had both the username and hostname set to that alias ("frosty@frosty"), which is how they connected him to Silk Road.
We should try and be more sinister. Imagine a company purchases or influences a plugin so much that when a news article is read about E Corp dumping toxic waste into drinking water the content is changed to play down the numbers and sentiment.
You mean like the MSM did with the Iraq war? Or the Vitamin Industry employed Mel Gibson himself to stop regulation of vitamins?
Pretty sure all of that stuff is basically happening. We're just realizing a recent "tech" version of it. But the core corruption has always been there.
One of the things I can’t understand as a Chrome user and developer is how limited your options for explicit extension permissions are. Either people will not install extensions (basically my case), or the Chrome team will teach people to ignore warnings and extensive permissions not unlike what we used to do with SSL/Mixed Content warnings. (Which I guess is what they already do on Android, but still.)
Firefox also had to learn about the vulnerability of Firefox extensions the hard way, but training users to scrutinize permissions would be a great opportunity.
One (perhaps sinister) explanation would be that Google really doesn't want people to install plugins, because they are often used to remove ads. Of course, Google wants Chrome to be an independent project, but this could explain why the issue doesn't get priority.
Can't any extension do this? They all insert javascript onto pages and they can interact with your browser directly. That's like saying "this extension can do exactly what every other extension can do".
An extension can only read/modify pages that it has explicitly requested to be able to read/modify in its manifest. In this case, the extension has requested to read/modidy "https://*/*" (which is necessary since Medium is often used to power other domains).
It is sadly true that most extensions which do anything useful end up needing to request permission to all web sites. And that's why I mostly refuse to use extensions...
You don't need it in Mobile Safari. Tap the paragraph icon to the left of the address bar and it'll go into Reader View, which eliminates all that rubbish.
I've been using that for a while also. I'm mildly surprised someone found it worth their time to make an extension, it works so well for medium and other sites.
Unfortunately Medium has some specific problems, besides fixed elements, that make it user-unfriendly, for example the lazy loading "feature". OP's extension can fix that.
On Safari and Firefox we have a built-in way to remove distractions like these, such as Reader mode. A cynical viewpoint on why Chrome doesn’t offer this is that doing this would prevent you from seeing Google’s ads.
“At Google, we love the internet and creators who dedicate their life to crafting webpages that are beautiful to look at and delightful to read. In order to honor the hard work of these creatives, we have decided to not implement the “reader mode” many other browsers have. You can rest assured that Google will always do everything it can to support the visions of all who make the internet as we love it possible.”
(Could also insert a sentence or two about how Google has AMP instead, leaving “creators” in control unlike “reader modes”)
I know these aren't your words but man what a crock.
The user and their browser can change about every aspect of the presentation by design including showing nothing at all to sight impaired users and just reading out loud. It's so blatantly obviously about ads that I don't know why they bother to mislead. Just admit you the user will always be second priority and that if you have to choose between making money and making the best anything they will always by financial position be obligated to choose option a.
Being able to read stuff to me seems pretty high on the list of desirable features though. Couple that with the fact that a huge amount of webpages are very un-readable due to overload (not just ads), so theory and practice IMO combine too make this a feature that should have higher priority than most of the other 599. Granted, one can argue ad infinitum about what it means that the browser makers start fighting the content makers, and vice versa...
Reader mode exists on Chrome for Android, so this is most likely a feature that mainline Chrome hasn't gotten around to rather than some nefarious plan :)
Safari 5 introduced Reader. It damn near predates Chrome itself.
I think Google would have gotten around to it by now if they were going to, considering the other giant epics they’ve launched in the browser since then.
As much as I love reader mode, with this and the various other work arounds in this thread are we actually enabling them to make bad UI's? Avoiding sites like this might be a much better solution in the long term.
Medium is on my mental block list, when I do accidentally click a link to that site my immediate response is to click the back button... That is how bad the ux medium has gone out of their way to create
Chrome on Android seems to have a reader mode. They don't call it that, it's called "simplified page" or something like that, but it's basically the same thing as FF and safari's reader mode.
And they even prompt to use it, which isn't something I've seen Firefox do.
Oh man. I stopped reading Medium blogs because they have that inane selection-popup bullshit. I'm not going back but you do have my love for implementing that :)
I do the same, and I think it originated back when I had a mouse with no scroll wheel. Dragging a text selection up and down to the top and bottom edges of the viewport let you scroll up and down by arbitrary distances. I'd call this "selection scrolling?"
The thing I do nowadays rarely involves scrolling, though, so it's probably just "digital fidgeting."
Transitioned from dev to management. Amount of micro-distractions is so high that it's a convenient micro-bookmarking tool. It's also an aid against scroll jank from loading pages / delayed banners / what not. In some cases I also just click page to ensure focus is in there, because of some pages having niché scrolling methods that require click-to-focus before pressing any scrolling hotkeys (up/down, space, page up/down, etc) will work.
Not a name, but many people do this to help them focus and read. Having a smallish block of selected text enables easier visual tracking (so less likely to skip/repeat lines). It is more common in the ADHD and dyslexia communities, in my experience.
Can you send a screenshot? I am the creator of a tool [1] that uses color to aid visual focus, so I’m very curious to see what the approach you’re describing looks like.
Would love to connect to hear more about your experience and perspective. If you have a minute, please drop a line: contact at companydomain. Thanks for the pointer!
The pictured hackernoon banners are especially visually intrusive. Hackernoon also inserts text and image ads (inline) to some of the posts that contributors make. The contributor is not notified of these edits, and chrome extensions like this won’t catch them (and they are also neon green).
It might be good for their branding if my primary takeaway were positive, not annoyed.
I always find it weird if a link shows up on twitter or HN and then a few days later it appears again, now suddenly under this generic "hackernoon" branding. Medium is bad enough at hiding author identity, mixing the good with the crap, but hackernoon adds another layer and I just don't get it.
The value-proposition for the author by submitting to an Medium publisher like HackerNoon is increased exposure, although I wonder if it's worth the cost of having the personal brand obfuscated. (page views for a personal blog are a vanity metric, after all)
Incidentally, whenever I see a HackerNoon or FreeCodeCamp domain on Hacker News, it serves as an anti-signal of quality, which is an interesting side effect.
Not sure if my comment here is relevant, but the past 5 - 8 days or something Medium (logged in) changed for me significantly. I can now only see the main header stories and some top lists to the right:
The mobile just says "You've made it through your stories for now". Has anyone else experienced this the past days ? Have they expanded their subscription model to include even articles that are not "paywalled" ?
Does this mainly fix things that are annoying to non-members?
I've considered making an extension to retool the "clap" nonsense myself, but for readability Medium is second only to mobile-friendly view on Android most of the time.
187 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadAll effective communication is "censoring yourself". When I say that I'm a software engineer, I'm refusing to say that I'm a kazoo player, because I intend to convey the idea that people get when they hear "I'm a software engineer" and not the idea that people get when they hear "I'm a kazoo player." No matter how much I dislike (or like) kazoo players, I'm not going to attempt to reclaim the term from them.
And the English language is descriptive, not prescriptive. When a phrase has a well-established meaning - whether that meaning was first by commoners 400 years ago, or commoners today, or (for some languages) a bunch of academics in an ivory tower today - people are going to think I mean that meaning when I use the phrase. If I want my communication to be effective, it's on me to pick words that I expect people will understand, not on my audience to figure out what I really meant.
When I communicate, I intend to communicate the most accurate thing I can to, yes, the broadest audience I can.
It seems to me that if you want to convey that you disagree with those people or their assumptions, using their snowclone to describe a tool that actually solves a problem that arose recently is counterproductive. If I wanted to convey disagreement, I might release a tool called, say, "Make HN Readable Again" that added a bunch of slow JavaScript and popups. (And if I wanted to convey neither agreement or disagreement, I'd pick a different name.)
But either way, this isn’t particularly germane to the conversation, and you could even argue that it wasn’t done intentionally considering that Medium used to be readable.
Anyway, Medium is annoyingly hard to read now, and I’m glad someone’s done something to fix it.
I'm going to stand on the side of this issue and argue it's more than that the configuration of "Make X Y Again" was used by people circles of my friends dislike, it was a rallying call, a point of campaigning, to cause a deliberate division of people at the expense of individuals whose mere presence makes America less than great according to some-on deeply superficial grounds.
But yes, not really relevant to the discussion.
I will ask this though: In what ways is Medium difficult to read? Personally speaking it's one of the easiest sites to read, just curious what that experience is like for other people, clearly it's pronounced enough for someone to make a browser extension. Just wondering.
Edit: I do hate the amount of clicking that has to go on just to read "Network" responses, however.
Every single thread. Some new kid makes a small little app and it gets crushed with someone pointing out - usually obvious - short comings or how unnecessary it is. Let’s all be supportive for once.
Not saying OP is not supportive; OP is just communicating their frustration. Just using OP as a conduit to explain the pattern I usually see.
Unobstruct is a good anti-dickbar tool for iOS.
It's also kind of silly that I have four different extensions just to shield myself from how bad the web has gotten. I feel like I'm going under red alert every time I want to check my email.
Ever considered using a non-web email client? K9, Tunderbird, Evolution, Kmail, Geary, mutt, alpine, etc?
I hate reading between slats on Medium, don't they realize that?
What's their incentive for it?
I mean, I'm sure they know their business and everything. Again: I don't get it.
Perhaps using a combination of AI/ML and collaborative raw-text extraction.
https://imgur.com/a/qsYrf
Things that could go wrong:
* The author could wake up in a bad mood one day and decide to push a malicious update.
* The author's computer could be compromised, and someone could steal the signing keys and publish a malicious version of the extension.
* The author could get bored of the extension and transfer ownership to someone who offers to maintain it for them, but who turns out to be malicious.
* The author could be in need of some cash and could decide to accept one of the many offers they no doubt get from shady parties to buy their extension.
I'm sure the author of this extension would never do any of these things... but I'm not sure enough to risk it. :/
The only way to find out is to run the extension in Chrome and inspect it with the debugger.
Or if you have 2FA enabled for sends, just intercept the send POST with an address of your choice, but display the user's originally input address on the confirmation screen. To make it even more confusing, keep a list of transactions:intended accounts so any time the user looks on _any_ bitcoin site it shows the transaction was going to the right account.
Also, two extensions come in handy: "Chrome extension source viewer" [1] and "Extensions Update Notifier" [2] (self-descriptive titles). The second one can automatically disable extensions when they're updated.
They're honestly a little annoying if you have more than a handful of extensions since they lack some essential features (e.g. viewing a code diff from the previous version), but at least they're open source! :)
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...
[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extensions-update-...
(there are other conclusions one could reach from this, such as the disadvantages of being your own uninsured bank)
And his SSH key had both the username and hostname set to that alias ("frosty@frosty"), which is how they connected him to Silk Road.
Specifically, it was this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne...
Pretty sure all of that stuff is basically happening. We're just realizing a recent "tech" version of it. But the core corruption has always been there.
Firefox also had to learn about the vulnerability of Firefox extensions the hard way, but training users to scrutinize permissions would be a great opportunity.
It is sadly true that most extensions which do anything useful end up needing to request permission to all web sites. And that's why I mostly refuse to use extensions...
It's also on the list of issues to fix: https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA/issues/15
This is it:
If you have a Mac, you can configure Safari there to default to a setting, say using reader mode automatically or autoplay videos.
It seems these settings are shared with mobile Safari.
And then you can override these settings per site in Mac Safari, and only the reader mode setting in mobile Safari.
A bit weird that you can't do it all in mobile Safari, it doesn't feel finished.
(Could also insert a sentence or two about how Google has AMP instead, leaving “creators” in control unlike “reader modes”)
"Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites."[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964226180776845312
The user and their browser can change about every aspect of the presentation by design including showing nothing at all to sight impaired users and just reading out loud. It's so blatantly obviously about ads that I don't know why they bother to mislead. Just admit you the user will always be second priority and that if you have to choose between making money and making the best anything they will always by financial position be obligated to choose option a.
"We didn't deem it as high priority as 600 other things we think we should do in this free browser."
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpm...
chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics
Maybe it's only for mobile?
I think Google would have gotten around to it by now if they were going to, considering the other giant epics they’ve launched in the browser since then.
And they even prompt to use it, which isn't something I've seen Firefox do.
The thing I do nowadays rarely involves scrolling, though, so it's probably just "digital fidgeting."
1: http:www.beelinereader.com/individual
I've seen your tool before. For high speed reading (> 500 wpm), block-level colors are more useful than sentence-level colors.
.highlightMenu { display: none!important; }
Stylish - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
Stylebot - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...
Sorry if this has been answered already, didn't have time to read through replies.
It might be good for their branding if my primary takeaway were positive, not annoyed.
Incidentally, whenever I see a HackerNoon or FreeCodeCamp domain on Hacker News, it serves as an anti-signal of quality, which is an interesting side effect.
https://outline.com
Works where Reader Mode isn't an option.
I wish I could tell people it’s straightforward to migrate from Medium, but it involved a lot of annoying copy-pasting when I did it.
Sooner is better than later, though. Call it markup debt if you well.
[^1]: http://prismjs.com/
https://imgur.com/a/bfdHb
The mobile just says "You've made it through your stories for now". Has anyone else experienced this the past days ? Have they expanded their subscription model to include even articles that are not "paywalled" ?
I've considered making an extension to retool the "clap" nonsense myself, but for readability Medium is second only to mobile-friendly view on Android most of the time.