How to read Medium blog posts & other paywalled articles for free!
Medium:
Note - do this at your own risk! The “Mediumship” Chrome extension (created by the author of the git repo described below) was removed from the Chrome Extension store a few months ago. There is a similar extension called “Medium Free” that is still available on the Firefox plugin store.
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Clone this git repo https://github.com/swapagarwal/mediumship
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Go to <chrome://extensions>. Click the “Load Unpacked” button and point to the “chrome” directory underneath the directory in which the “mediumship” repo was downloaded.
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Voila! You now have the Mediumship extension installed. Click on this while viewing a Medium post that is behind a membership wall and it will open up as readable in a new tab.
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Btw - here’s a good reference on creating a chrome extension: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-make-a-chrome-extension
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Also, if you don’t want to go this route - just tweet the medium URL from your account and access the URL from your feed.
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I ended up not using this and resuming my Medium subscription, because this approach does not work on my iPhone (iOS Chrome browser does not support extensions. apparently Firefox does and the “Yandex” version of Chrome does, but I haven’t tried this)
MIT tech Review, NYT, Economist, Business Insider, Washington Post, Boston Globe
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Just “block Javascript” for the corresponding site in your desktop browser. e.g. for Chrome, click on the lock icon to the left on the URL, go to Site Settings and under Javascript, select “Block”. This hack comes from https://hackernoon.com/how-i-hacked-the-mit-technology-review-website-many-more-and-gained-unlimited-online-access-e89a57cdc248. The author has reported this website flaw to the site admins, so it might get corrected soon.
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Have not tried this on my iPhone.