How to Read Medium-Sized Articles for Free
Medium, a blogging platform / publisher that once wanted to revolutionize online media, has posted its content for a $ 5 per month paywall. After a couple of free articles a month, you won’t be able to read anything else without paying. If you are not using Twitter.
Since February, articles on Medium are free if you follow them on Twitter. This way, if someone tweets Medium content or sends it in a direct message, no one clicks on the link to get paid access. This applies even when you write DM yourself. It’s an easy way to view any article on Medium for free.
If you are using Medium’s paywall, just open Twitter, go to your DMs, and send the DMs yourself a link. Then click a link in your own DM and you’re in it.
It’s a little work, but less work than bypassing the paywalls at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Although the posts Medium may be very different in quality, there are several high-quality publications such as Gen and OneZero , as well as all the old publications that Medium cultivated and closed .
I tested this DM process with a dozen links in a row from many Medium publications and it kept working. So if this trick has a speed limit of some kind, then it exceeds the number of articles on Medium that you are likely to come across on a given day. After you embed that many URLs on Twitter every day, you can just pay five dollars a month.
I was hoping Twitter would just add a string to the end of the outgoing URLs to tell other sites that the visitor came from Twitter. This way I could pretend I came from Twitter by pasting the line at the end of the Medium article url and skipping the DM process. But Twitter runs all outbound links through their t.co url shortener, so I couldn’t find a simple workaround. If you manage to hack one together, share it with the class.