It's still the nicest, simplest web design I know that has any level of popularity for blogging. I'd still rather read on Medium than on Wordpress or Discourse or Blogger or Ghost or really any popular blog layout I've seen.
I don't want to trivialize how annoying the login popups are, but ultimately I put up with them for the sake of a more readable article on the other side.
The UI/UX for medium comments is so utterly horrible it makes me angry just thinking about it.
I was reading some interesting articles the other idea, and it was a painful, torturous struggle to read all of the comments and their nested responses.
The entire text of a comment should not be a clickable link! And you shouldn't have to go to a new page to read comment replies...
Deeply nested discussions get harder, much like on StackOverflow. I think it's a deliberate design decision and I'm not convinced it's a bad one; you do miss out on some deeper discussion, but it encourages people to work-up their responses into full-sized posts (and making a new post is very easy).
Fair enough, I get that it is non-trivial to design UI for nested discussions.
I'm most annoyed by the entire comment being a clickable link that takes you off of the page (and the scroll position being lost when you click "back").
I've accidentally clicked on a comment numerous times. I then have to click the back button, scroll down to the comments section, click "show all comments", and then search for the comment I was reading, just to simply to get back to where I was. It is a quite bad user experience when it happens.
I don't want to trivialize how annoying the login popups are, but ultimately I put up with them for the sake of a more readable article on the other side.
What blog styles do you like reading?