Loading and reading Medium.com articles on my mid-range phone was an awful experience
So I built a browser plugin to alleviate that
I am still running with a Moto G 2016 as my daily mobile device.
Remarkably, it still manages rather well overall such as switching between multiple mobile apps and reading newsletter’s posts on the Firefox Android browser.
However, nothing makes me hate it more than when I try to load and read a Medium article on the browser. As shown in the video above, the hardware chokes trying to load it. Reading and scrolling it was an equally, if not more, awful experience.
The reason is that what seemingly is a simple elegant blogging platform, has no clothes. You can view its dirty laundry in this gist.
For what should have been a simple blog post, an awful lot happens in a Medium article that are an antithesis to the sole reading exercise of an end-user.
I probably wouldn’t have been bothered as much if it wasn’t the fact that Medium articles rank highly in my search results. I had been so traumatized that I had conditioned myself to scan past results that point to Medium.
The ones that have not been negatively affected are those who own expensive high-end devices. But did we build the web for wealthy western societies, or a web that’s claimed to be open to all wherever might be? Those that are constantly seeking to free themselves from poverty trap in every corner of the world would be held back when trying to learn all the knowledge there is in Medium.com on their low-end devices with limited resources.
Perhaps this was another logical progression of the neoliberal social-economic paradigm we all find ourselves operating in. Rather than limiting oneself to a humble mission — in the case of Medium, a no-frills blogging service — tech startups, driven by stratospheric self-reinforcing private capital and privilege, seek monopoly as the end-game; an all-encompassing platform, treating captured end-users as a mere data point to be manipulated and capitalized via A/B testing.
Anyway, whatever.
