Every personal site I've ever seen looks worse than Medium. I don't want the "character" of a slightly different UI every time, I want the interface to get out of my way so that I can get on with reading the actual content. Medium does that (yes, subject to logging in, but you can do that once and forget about it).

Different strokes for different folks I suppose, but rarely have I seen a personal site with a UI as obnoxious as Medium, I won't even click medium links on HN unless the content looks tremendously interesting. Especially as on most personal blogs if I'm only reading the linked article I don't have to engage with any of the UI, whereas with medium I have to dismiss the annoying modal dialogs.

On a related note, this is why when I search for a person, film, or other thing, I'll take the Wikipedia result every time over IMDB or some top ranking site. With Wikipedia, I know how the information will be formatted so I can find what I need quickly.

Man and I've never found much to like with the layout of Medium. The text is nice and big and that's about it. It gets as messy as any personal blog IMO.

Firefox's reader mode does exactly what you looking for.

When it works. It's still an extra click even then.

Safari can defaut to reader mode for some sites. I would assume the same is possible with Firefox.

Still far far better than dealing with all of Medium's formatting and site practices.

Creating an account for a site that doesn't respect its users so that the nagging disappears?

Man the internet must suck for that sentence to exist.

> Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context.

And there are probably LOTS of people who don't care. Feels like folks on HN miss this important point.

Hosting content there is okay as long as you put your own domain on it. The migrating away from it won't cause too much problem if some trouble rises.

They are specifically making that process harder and harder. That's partly why HackerNoon left

And where are they now, HackerNoon? Growing a team and scamming investors?

The custom domain feature doesn't exist anymore.

I think its because of the ease of startup -- its essentially a good looking by default blog (as long as you ignore the paywalls, newsletter signups, "Join Medium" popups" etc) that is free and takes like a minute to get started with.

So people join, start publishing then realize its too much work to switch so they just continue using it.