Back to Medium thing — I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, as long as the community always has “fuck you servers” — an easy exit from the commercial offerings if the commercial players start playing the #extraction game.
Finally, it is ironic that Medium is the company involved here — they are pioneering #enshittifiers as you eloquently pointed out in 2017:
Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars
https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars
When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Right now it’s gotten to the point where when people realize an article is on Medium, they think, “Oh, crap, it’s on Medium.”
It's the CSS for dickbars (the floating bars at the bottom and top of the browser window) preventing page-up and -down from working correctly, right? Where it scrolls just a bit too far and one needs to reverse a few lines to find your place?
("dickbar" nomenclature coined by John Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/06/dickbar)
even #dickbar was better than this
(https://web.archive.org/web/20220426031215/https://twitter.com/dickc/status/1518789890473078784)
feels like long ago days of bird apps! still now, i can see the tweetie influence on all of them…
but will we see the #dickbar return??? Maybe as an option?
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