Make Medium Readable Again
A browser extension to make Medium a little more readable.
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Matt Baer

Make Medium Readable Again - A browser extension to make Medium a little more readable.

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Especially when you're not logged in and trying to read something, Medium can be a bit distracting. This browser extension fixes that, paring down the reading experience so you can focus on an author's words again.

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Matej Latin
Could something be done to improve the typography of it as well? At first I thought this plugin would do that. The line-height is just ridiculously large... Well done btw, Medium is slowly but surely turning into the same thing the traditional newspapers do to keep afloat. Quite ironic, considering that it was built as a new-age, digital medium...
Matt Baer
Maker
@matejlatin Thanks -- it's definitely ironic, and looks to me more like a last effort to increase revenue as quickly as possible. But we can definitely improve the typography. If you feel like directly making the changes, please feel free to update the CSS file (https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA/...) and submit a pull request -- otherwise what would you like to see changed besides the line height?
Matt Baer
Maker
Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I spend most of my day on a computer, writing code and occasionally taking a break to read something online. So one night last summer when I stumbled across a Medium article (as one does), I noticed a problem: I couldn't focus on the words. I was logged out, and these two big horizontal sections took up most of my poor 12.1" screen, and then wouldn't go away as I scrolled, nagging me to "Get Updates" as I went. Logging in made it all better. But that little annoyance already made me lose focus on whatever I was reading. It gave me flashbacks to some bad UX decisions I've had to implement at previous startups, invariably because "it would get more users." I wanted to fix it, so I took a few minutes to throw together a Chrome extension -- and when a few lines of Javascript completely improved the situation, I released it to the rest of the world. This is that browser extension. In the time since, I've had many lively discussions with other people just as annoyed with Medium doing this to them, and we've built fixes for those problems into the extension. The code is free / open source, so feel free to give your input or make any improvements you want! 👉 https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA I'd also love to hear what you think here!
Rakita András
Congratulations for your extension, I saw that on Hacker News. Their Designing Medium blog has a really interesting article about how they overengineered the underlines below their links. It is funny because on my iOS devices the links are bearly noticeable. Look at this post, literally about how they design links: https://imgur.com/a/yVogpYH Top highlighted link is how they think I see them, bottom one is an actual link. Probably you should include a hack for that too.