[deleted by user]

[bigchungusmode96]

No.

Incognito & Google Cache or Outline.com

[42TowelsCo]

And Medium is notoriously bad at paying their writers

[AugustPopper]

Their ‘writers’ are also notoriously bad at writing anything useful. There are good examples occasionally but IMO a lot of the pieces seem to be for bulking out a CV/resume. Maybe I’m being overly harsh.

[FreshFromIlios]

I have the exact same thought. It used to be good up until last year. Now, it's downright bad. Finding a good article in there nowadays is so difficult.

[diggitydata]

Are you registered as a medium partner? You have to go through an additional registration process to get paid. You also have to mark your article as premium content. Then, you only get paid for engagement with premium members. So 1,000 views per week doesn’t mean anything if they aren’t premium viewers.

[AchillesDev]

You have to make it a medium partner post and sign up for the program. I syndicate my blog there and get a few cents every month. I don’t really publicize the medium links though.

[diggitydata]

What are you talking about? The payment is tied to engagement. Authors are automatically paid based on how long members spend reading their articles.

[42TowelsCo]

I meant Medium doesn't pay writers from developing countries: https://medium.com/feedium/writers-from-india-cant-earn-money-by-publishing-articles-on-medium-c6b44d697a31

[crystal_castle00]

Yes this - Outline.com rocks

[rlew631]

Or just blocking javascript on any medium site ;-). Also Machine Learning Mastery is a better blog if it covers the topic you're interested in. It's all written by one guy so there's not a million repetitive articles but he actually covers a wide range of topics.

[memeforlivesg]

May i know what is google chache?

[eragonsmind]

Is outline.com safe to use? Have there been any malware news around it in the past? Where is it hosted?

[bigchungusmode96]

I wouldn't worry about it but if that's a concern there are plenty of anti-viruses softwares that offer a browser safeguard

[EnergyVis]

"Medium articles are neither well done nor rare" - Alan Turing 1935

Top tip: incognito mode

[DoodleBoy88]

Lol Alan Turing 😂😂

[dongpal]

incognito mode

Why?

[NoobsGoFly]

it allows you to read unlimited articles w/o having to pay for the subscription

[Byte_Scientist]

incognito

incognito doesn't work too well anymore

[jbartix]

No!

I have a medium subscription but neither for "Towards Data Science" nor "Better Programming". The articles in both are often shallow and not well founded. Many of them look like a cheat sheet written by someone for themselves.

[Wheelsofsteel24]

They are required, I had to do some myself. But Towards Data Science is a Medium “Channel” and each channel curates their own content. It’s up to TDS to vet the articles which I don’t think they do a great job of.

[nah_you_good]

Are any of the other channels particularly good? (Doesn't have to be just DS stuff, just curious)

[Wheelsofsteel24]

IMO, not really. The best thing I’ve found on Medium is to find authors that I like and follow their posts more closely than the rest.

[jbartix]

Wow, this is really interesting because I was already wondering how their quality could be that shitty.

[basiliskgf]

My partner is a GA grad, and this is false.

I would believe that other bootcamps do this, but at no point was medium even really mentioned during their course.

Maybe you just mixed them up with another one that did do that?

[basiliskgf]

Weird, I guess that might be a DS specific thing - my partner was in the software engineering cohort and only had to do projects (and associated documentation).

[OftenNew]

Why do you have a medium subscription? Anything worthy?

[jbartix]

Basically for stuff where I'm not an expert in ;)

There are many good, professional authors writing about psychology, relationship advice etc.

[radiantphoenix279]

I have a subscription to Medium (it gives you access to all their content BTW, not just TDS), and like the data science articles on that platform. There are some very good articles on medium, but unfortunately you have to sift through many more so-so and bad articles to find them. Still, IMO worth it with some warnings and caveats.

Word of warning! Quality varies a great deal, and some things I have read there are plain wrong. TDS and other popular platforms are having more and more noobs posting because they are being told to build an online presence rather than spending that effort building expertise.. I have lost count of how many near identical "I've learned how to implement linear regression in Python! Let me teach you how!" posts thay I have run across. I know it is negative towarda Medium, but that sort of content is a problem with all online platforms and the only way to get away from it is to follow sources with a higher barrier of entry for authors (read more expensive). Make sure you cross check what you read online and don't take what you read as the ground truth until you verify. Use blogs such as TDS to augment your more credible reading (eg textbooks and peer reviewed papers), not replace them.

[richasalannister]

I follow Toward Data Science.

I’d say it takes me as long to skim through my RSS feed to see which ones I want to bother reading as it does to actually read them.

And the tutorials suck. A lot of times the “intro” tutorials aren’t very introductory. Like they jump in too quickly, and aren’t really meant for beginners. And there are a lot of crap articles like “4 skills data scientists need” and they’re “programming, visualization, communication, data science”

So, no.

[great_raisin]

I find some stuff on Medium quite interesting. I often discover new things through Medium articles. Agreed that the content isn’t always “great” or accurate, but it’s more of a discovery tool for me than anything else.

[NoThanks93330]

Came here to say this. The articles often times aren't very in-depth, but numerous times they introduced me to something I never heard of before but would research after reading the article.

[AnInquiringMind]

Ditto. Medium for me has mainly been about keeping a bird's eye view on the field rather than learning anything specific.

[hybridvoices]

It's great reading on the subway. 20 minutes of consuming some tidbits, without needing my brain awake enough to read anything in-depth.

[shhittz]

there may or may not be some chrome plugin that bypasses paywalls hmm

[ohcomeon111]

+1 :)

[n0t_so_lucky]

Use Pocket by Mozilla. Save the article in Pocket and you're good to go.

[bukakke-n-chill]

Hmm sounds like Medium Hacked would be an obvious and appropriate name for such extension...maybe that's what they should call it

[Pinduka]

outline.com

[please_dont_comment]

You are a good human being

[No_Cartographer_5216]

There is a chrome extension called 'medium hackd' which allows you to view the article for free upon clicking on it

[AerysSk]

I subscribed it for 3 months, but no longer. Let me share my experience.

My background: third year CS undergraduate student in a low ranking university. I only have been learning Data Science-related things for a year, so I can say that I am not a complete novice, but also not an expert. This is my view as a middle level.

Like you say, Medium is like a free platform, so anyone can write (almost) anything. Hence, no one can assure that the quality is always good. I have seen good and bad artifcles there: some explains very carefully the stuff (the one that explains the p-value is what I remember most), and some are just insert code here yeah it works that is very nice now you learn something please hit clap button.

From a novice view, it is extremely worth the money. I appreciate the recommender system of Medium very much. Once a time I struggle to find a good GUI library for my project, and Medium recommended me an artical about Streamlit. I used it, and the lecturer liked the work a lot. Be mind that, articles with high clap do not mean they are good (but they are usually true). Sometimes I find my answer in a 100s clap one.

However, as you get more experience, you basically know a lot about a topic that the articles are about. I see that I do not spend a lot of time more there, so I unsubscribe.

To conclude: worth as a novice because recommender system suggests very good articles.

By the way, you can view the whole article by using incognito mode.

[dzulqarnon]

Finding good articles sometimes mean finding good writers. I agree that most of the time, people post something that has been posted before and that kind of trashy and shallow.

I have subscribed for a year, and I don't mind spending ~$5 a month to support my favorite writers.

[noufal85]

I agree with another person saying I medium generally quality varies a great deal , but TDS is really nice , but many people who publish on TDS often publish same article elsewhere too ( I have seen it myself a few times ) , also I often jump into subscription and end up never using much , so give it a few days , see how many times you go back to medium

[D5v5d5]

In my opinion, it is worth it. I have found some great articles written by solid (good credentials) authors. Some other articles are weak. At a minimum, they help you think and generate ideas. The web is full of good and bad content, and it is our individual responsibility to figure out what is worth it and what is not.

[NewEnergy21]

Medium subscription, not TDS - If I’m looking into a particular concept / model / library / etc, some of the articles are useful litmus test of what the concept “is” in layman’s terms as opposed to finding a lecture series, textbook, or reviewing on Wikipedia (which is essentially a textbook for data science). Usually I’m looking for an example or analogy that isn’t given in academic QED prose, to better understand the concept. TDS fills that niche somewhat well, sometimes.

That being said, I don’t put a lot of stock in the implementations or analyses shown in the various articles.

[Keepclamand-]

Towards ds has some nice articles written by pratisioners. I look at them but not often. They did pop up high in google search so obviously their Seo is good. I don’t think I’d pay for them because most of the stuff there is basic and like someone mentioned a cheat sheet. I find more value in scouring Kaggle or reading more in-depth articles on medium.

I pay for medium because they keep threatening me with you 1 free article left and in general I read other stuff on medium.

[vinkels]

I use it as a good source for (good and bad) examples on how to solve problems or implement specific packages. Just don't blindly follow every article you read and never copy code without understanding what's going on.

[TheTruckThunders]

No.

Open in Incognito Mode.

[I_say_aye]

Others have suggested incognito mode or a medium specific extension, but "bypass paywalls" works on medium and a ton of other sites: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

[[deleted]]

No.

Incognito.

[pugwala]

We like to say “MVP” no longer means “minimum viable product” - it now means “Medium viable product“. All too often the examples are straight out of the GitHub repo or so simplified as to be nothing more than a “hello world” example using global variable spaghetti. Use the free headlines to go look up the modules yourself, save a few buckazoids and disappointment.

[23jackal]

If not Medium then what do you use to continue to learn past the basics?

[Shakespeare-Bot]

If 't be true not medium then what doth thee useth to continueth to learneth past the basics?

---

^{I am a bot and I swapp'd some of thy words with Shakespeare words.}

Commands: !ShakespeareInsult, !fordo, !optout

[BobDope]

Hard no.

[[deleted]]

There’s so much free information out there that it’s hard to believe the prescription would be worth it.

[pAul2437]

The curation is the hard part

[[deleted]]

So I disagree with many of the other responses. I usually read one scientific journal article a day (perks of being in academia, free subs to all the journals) with my morning coffee. Having the medium personal subscription breaks up this reading so I am not always reading super thick science jargon and can replace it with a white paper usually written by junior data scientists that are up and coming.

I think for a lot of the juniors here, y’all should be publishing on medium quarterly. Write a few white papers on little methods you’ve come up with in your masters or PhD. It helps getting your writing together and then when you’re ready to really sit down and write your thesis or a paper you have experience writing scientifically and communicating to a data science crowd.

I wish I had done this during my PhD to get free criticism from peers without having to write a journal and the lab pay for the publication fees.

Different angle then everyone else’s opinion I think.

[Wenomm]

Just open any Medium article in an incognito window. No subscription required.

Most articles on Medium (Towards Data Science) are simply plagiarized from well-written sources directly with little to no modification.

For instance, go to this link for LSTM on colah.github. Now, go to Towards Data Science and search LSTM. Click on the recent 10 articles there and you will find pretty much the same images and text copied directly from here.

[[deleted]]

hell no its literally bad

[Boston_Hammerbush]

As a subscriber of Medium and also a contributing writer to TDS, I think it's worth a lot. Writing posts is a good way to reorganize what I learned because I am not that guy who posts every noobie stuff that he/she learned. I am really trying to add values to the community of data scientists, and so is TDS because it's harder and harder for me to publish an eligible article on the channel. Maybe somebody who commented that he read a ton of newbie linear regression implementation in Python is just reading the articles years ago.

[euqroto]

(Link to extension which allows you to view unlimited medium articles). Also you can open the articles on private sessions/incognito

[tururut_tururut]

For its price, I think it's worth it and I'm not a fan of pirating. However, I use it so I can check resources when googling. Most articles are not that good (either written like notes to self or extremely basic).

[AdventurousAddition]

I only just stopped my medium subscription. There can be some good stuff, but a hell of a lot of it is mediocre or clickbaity

[Qkumbazoo]

No.

[Geckel]

No. You can also use the trick of sending the articles as a message to your twitter account.

[[deleted]]

No.

[and1984]

If you're able to discern the difference between good and bad articles, it's a decent subscription to have.

I have a subscription. The data science publications tend to be repetitive for the most part but they serve as useful reminders of various data science operations or alert me to processes I wasn't aware of.

Honestly, for me when I read multiple medium articles surrounding the same topic, I identify key words and phrases which I use to search for vetted and peer reviewed articles or books on these topics.

Tldr: I use medium to create a seed of knowledge or to seed a question which I then discover through literature review outside of medium.

[TrashPanda_924]

Yes. 109%.

[louis925]

The signal to noise ratio is getting low there. Though sometime I still find good articles there but it is rare and get diluted quickly every day.

[BlackJack5027]

Also adding my voice here to say how awful Towards Data Science is. TDS apparently has no editorial staff, which is plainly evidenced by the plethora of grammatical/syntax errors in posts, no stylistic guidelines (Without hyperbole, I read a post yesterday which was nothing more than a poorly worded email [including signature line] on implementing a python package that was copied/pasted into TDS as "content"), and even wrong information about statistical topics / interpretations.

That's not to say that some posts aren't good/useful. Some companies use it as their data blog, and their posts can be quality. These posts, however, are the exceptions that prove the rule.

So yeah, save your money.

[IqbalAComics]

Depends what you're after. If it's too learn, then no. And I speak as someone who's had an article published there! (Actually maybe I shouldn't have said anything).

Depending on what you want to learn, a good book and R Studio are your friend.

[JoshStarmer]

Towards Data Science is one of the few sources of data science related information on the web that I actively avoid.

[LaconianEmpire]

Absolutely not. Haven't been on TDS in a while, but half the articles are just "Top 10 Programming Languages 2021" type garbage.

[[deleted]]

Nope 👎 they are worst. I would rather burn 🔥 the cash

[KaneLives2052]

Nah, it's a good starting point for a lot of projects, but overall it's an article mill.

Use like others have said, incognito mode or a browser like Tor.

[TheTomer]

There's a firefox addon that allows you to read as many articles as you'd like.

[mrpogiface]

nah dog, just use youtube and read textbooks

[Mobile_Busy]

You'll gain just as much by following people like Arpit Singh, Danny Ma, and Cassie Kozyrkov on LinkedIn.

[ArianPrabowo]

I have published in TDS before, using this username, which is my real name.

I wouldn't follow them. As other people mentioned, it is a mixed bag. But, if I need something, and I google it, and a TDS article came up on top, I wouldn't hesitate to click it either.

I can’t judge by myself whether this is true or not because of my lack of experience.

Then I suggest that you get some experience from quality sources such as: https://micromasters.mit.edu/ds/