Is Medium becoming a walled garden?
Most of unknow medium, a cool blogging platform from the founders of Twitter, one thing that made Medium popular is it’s beautiful editor. Which is still by far the best editor out there.
I liked medium and used it for sometime before I lost interest due to the fact that you can’t build any identity from medium. But still I maintain some collection on medium where others are submitting stories.
Yesterday when I went to medium I was greeted with a screen like this,
It was different from the usual screen because I could see submitted stories that hit the home page, instead I had to sign in to read stories. I think one reason is because they customize the stories on the homepage according to your subscriptions and recommendations. But even though if you are not writing on medium it you still can’t read top stories on the homepage that used to be there without signing in.
If you want to read stories without signing in, you’ve to click the last link at the bottom of the page in very small font Find something interesting to read which means it’s the last thing medium want, that is read a story without signing in.
When today I came across link to a medium post in another website, when I clicked the link I came to a screen like this,
Which forced me to log in if I want to read the story, without signing in you can’t read the story. I had to edit the url of the address bar to get into the story without signing in, which majority want be able to do.
This is so much quora like, where Quora doesn’t let you read answers without singing in. But quora is a different product, medium is something totally different.
Medium is a blogging platform, blogs are a place where people express their ideas, it shouldn’t have to be a walled garden like Facebook or other social network that forces people to sign in before they can see what’s inside.
Blogs shouldn’t have limitations censorships and restrictions, freedom of expression is like the main pillar of blogging. What about all the countries that have censored Twitter? How can they read a medium blog post now?
I believe it’s a very bad move by medium, I think it’s against everything what’s blogging is here on the internet. Medium is a product that is changing quickly, I hope they will reconsider about it.
— Thameera Senanayaka (@thameera) April 13, 2014