Medium is terrible, I don't quite understand why people allow a company to monetize their blog for medium's gain. But, that's their choice, not mine.

In my experience, people use it for street cred basically. Whether somewhat disingenuously to 'validate' (sic) poor content by mere association with the 'brand' name (cue Forbes, LinkedIn...), or more genuinely when 'legitimate' authors seek to give exposure to their sharing via the 'brand' platform (e.g. "Our <N> years of exp with tech <X> at shop <B>" by lead figure <I>).

Which is a completely different approach than building one's own business. These platforms can still help drive traffic to a decent website though.

It’s a convenient place to publish the odd posting or two. I’ve also found that there’s some (unwarranted) perceived credibility plus it can be a good place to link that’s not mixed in with random personal stuff.

I use it for professional stuff that needs to be linked to but which isn’t on an official blog property of some sort.

I do keep a personal blog but sometimes cross-post to Medium.

ever since Facebook, youtube and other mega platforms, people seem to forget that a decentralized web also means that you should host your own content. I agree with you and find it sad that everything on internet today is hosted by some of those mega tech companies that dictate their laws and what we can and cannot see.

It's a pleasant writing experience. Don't even have to think about the title... meanwhile for my static site the title torments me because I need to put it there as the file name... of course I could just rename it or whatever but there's cognitive overload here (for me).

Traffic

Content discovery via Medium itself is extremely poor, so this isn't really a complete answer on its face.

The ability to handle traffic is what was meant.

I don't think it was. Handling blog traffic is not difficult.

The thing is, it doesn't get better when you log in. I deleted my account shortly after creating it, because medium kept nagging me about stuff.

How about disable JS/Cookies for Medium?

That works like a charm and takes care the most obnoxious aspects of reading something in medium but there is a caveat: Images seem to be loading gradually as you scroll, so if you disable js you might miss some of them.

This is the add-on I use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...

So that they can make money by tracking you. Curl does not give money to Medium.

Medium works mostly ok with JavaScript off. Some images don't show, but all the text, and no nagging.

Click that little "x" in the upper left corner of the pop-up.

I just instinctively hit reader view on my iPad, and that worked too.

This.

I hope there will be some kind of option like ‘open this link in reader mode’.

What a great idea. I would use that so much. Firefox reader mode is already pretty good, this would be an icing on the cake.

I use this addon for FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/automatic-reader...

There is an overlay setting in Safari on iOS 13, but I think it was on 12 aswell but harder to get to it (I think you have to tap and hold the reader icon)

I think you can set reader view as default for a domain in safari (going forward)

You can even just press esc!