# Medium 11 Hacker News commenters recommended Medium and 86 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Publishing platform where writers can earn from readers; people value the monetization, but critics say paywalls, pop-ups and surface-level posts are common. ## Why people recommend it - Lets writers earn from readers (2 comments): "that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091834)) "tries to bring down the friction of making valuable content available at a reasonable price" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45789978)) ## What people warn about - Low-quality, surface-level content (6 comments): "Nowadays Medium is just AI slop and low-effort surface-level takes from people trying to build a personal brand." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587895)) "stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48023715)) "full of surface-level takes on language and technology choice without going into serious technical detail" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029953)) - Paywalls and pop-ups block reading (5 comments): "All of the previously submitted articles are similarly paywalled." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716871)) "The reading experience is abhorrent; I couldn't even finish reading this article before a full screen popup literally blocked the sentence I was reading." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100696)) "I have a special hatred for medium.com because almost everything over there is aggressively paywalled" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163459)) - Tracking and walled-garden lock-in (4 comments): "we have to go to a whole slew of walled gardens to read posts from folks, such as substack, medium, twitter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658616)) "all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46015851)) "The way Medium used my non-monetized account as a subscription/registration trampoline." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578235)) - Slow site, blocks image zoom (2 comments): "Is it a coincidence that that's around the time frame that I noticed the Medium web site becoming slower than it used to be?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471797)) "Medium's annoying way it blocks zooming in/out on images when on mobile is limiting and frustrating!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571761)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Substack](https://hackerapproved.com/p/substack.md): 87 recommend - [Leaflet (leaflet.pub)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/leaflet.md): 22 recommend - [Ghost CMS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghost.md): 21 recommend - [Bear Blog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bear-blog.md): 18 recommend - [TextLog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/textlog.md): 16 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://medium.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Medium", https://hackerapproved.com/p/medium/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).