
Why I Don't Write For Medium - josephwegner
https://medium.com/p/c7cc156bc5d9
======
quaunaut
> There isn’t even a way for me to put a link to my twitter or my personal
> website so that I can drive that traffic somewhere useful.

> Joe Wegner Career Nerd. Was an IT guy. Is a software engineer
> (@CultivateStudios). Loves Christ. Married to @Erica_Wegner.
> [http://t.co/yEBP9xbDiu](http://t.co/yEBP9xbDiu)

Am I missing something?

~~~
fragmede
Yes - that byline is on an eminently unreadable light-grey-on-white and is
easily skipped - it had to be pointed out to me that a friend had actually
written an article I'd read!

Do authors get any branding past that byline? Maybe on the main page, but not
on the article itself, not that I've seen. Thanks to link aggregators/HN, I've
only hit articles directly and not the actual Medium.com home page.

Nor, unless everything a writer writes is on Medium, is there any continuity -
where's the Medium.com link to any of Wegner's other writings?

Good for Medium, not great for a writer.

Medium is all about Medium, which is Wegner's valid point.

------
sytelus
If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant
idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out
of the building. Only Evan Williams can do 3 startups in a row, two of which
are blog engines and one of which is... well, again a blog engine (albeit with
140 char limit). Granted he never seems to have any brilliant original ideas,
but the dude knows how to spread his stuff like wildfire and pile up yet
another billion dollar in the process. Almost overnight, posts on Medium has
been appearing on HN like TechCrunch and other well known outlets who have put
years on building reputation. To me, most posts doesn't seem to have that much
of a substance but headlines are eye catching and they do get lots of upvotes
(hopefully, not from faking). Seriously, how does he do it?

~~~
jonnathanson
Medium isn't just a blogging engine, per se. As the author of this article
points out, it's also a content farm. The genius of Medium is that it
(theoretically) encourages people to post thoughtful, good content -- and the
collective efforts of everyone doing this create a high-quality content farm
at scale. This is different from the typical take on content-farming, i.e.,
paying a bunch of people peanuts to crank out endless iterations on aggregated
Miley Cyrus headlines.

Now, one could certainly make the argument that Medium's game is a little
shady. To paraphrase _The Usual Suspects_ : "The greatest trick Medium ever
played was convincing the world it wasn't a content farm."

One could argue, furthermore, that most of the content on Medium isn't all
that good. But I think the jury's still out on that charge. I've seen some
good stuff on Medium, and I've seen some crap. But it doesn't seem, on
average, markedly better or worse than what I'd expect to see on a random walk
through any other blogging platform.

------
AlexanderDhoore
Let's play a game:

\--- False Medium or Real Medium !?! ---

1) "Yes, Vagina, There Is No Such Thing as Normal"

2) "I Tattooed My Friend’s Name On My Head…And Then We Broke Up"

3) "Living With a Cracked iPhone Screen"

4) "Changing Condom Culture"

5) "A Night at the Laundromat"

6) "In which the NSA and I freak each other out on LinkedIn"

Some of these are really from Medium, some are from the parody FalseMedium
[1]. Can you guess which ones are fake?! (Answers [2])

[1] [https://twitter.com/FalseMedium](https://twitter.com/FalseMedium)

[2] [http://pastebin.com/Kh7B1b9C](http://pastebin.com/Kh7B1b9C)

~~~
pstack
Medium makes me laugh the same way showing up at an open-mic night full of
amateur "poets" at the coffee shop makes me laugh.

~~~
pestaa
You mean the "laughing for 5 seconds and then burying your head in your hands"
way?

~~~
baseten
Probably more like laughing for 5 seconds, then standing there awkwardly for
another 120 seconds, then getting your coffee and getting the hell out of
there as quickly as possible way.

------
mrkurt
Github's indemnity clause is at _least_ as scary as Medium's licensing clause.

Any company that relies on user generated content needs users to agree to what
Medium's legalese says. At least it's explicit. Assuming you own the copyright
to content you put on Medium, how else can they publish it? Github's language
is informal, and not written in terms of copyright, but is functionally the
same ... though the full term isn't included in the parent:

> We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to
> the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by
> setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view
> your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree
> to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

~~~
josephwegner
Allowing people to view my content is much different from giving a company the
rights to redistribute it. Github's terms may be less formal, but they say
very different things.

~~~
mrkurt
Serving your content up to readers is redistributing it. You are implicitly
granting Github that right by agreeing to let them serve your content to other
users.

Note that Github isn't in the user generated content business, primarily, so
they are less at risk by leaving the terms loose and human. I would generally
prefer Medium's terms, but written / translated into non-legalese. Some
company did this a few years ago, I wish I could find it.

------
thrownaway2424
This person is very confused about copyright and the difference between an
exclusive and non-exclusive right to redistribute.

~~~
josephwegner
I'd love for you to expand on this. Truthfully I am not an expert on copyright
law, but I do find many ToS to be fairly self explanatory.

I'd be happy to update the post if I was misleading somewhere.

~~~
mrkurt
Medium needs a license to your content to publish it. That clause grants them
that license. Non-exclusive means they're not asking you for ownership,
they're just asking for a license that allows them to distribute the content.

If they wanted ownership, they'd do something like Craigslist:

> You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that
> you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable,
> unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers),
> worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative
> works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works)
> and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and
> assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against
> any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or
> exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you
> post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction,
> harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post).

~~~
jforman
"they're just asking for a license that allows them to distribute the content"

The license is _much_ broader than this:

"By furnishing your User Content to Medium, you give Medium a non-exclusive
worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to utilize all
copyright rights now in existence or that may arise in the future with respect
to your User Content, in any medium that now exists or may arise in the
future, as well as to do anything else that is reasonably appropriate to our
Service and its use of your User Content (including, but not limited to, use
of your name in association with your User Content to identify you as the
contributor). The license has no restriction as to the medium, dissemination
method, type of Service we may offer, or the type of systems or products that
may be used in conjunction with your User Content."

You can revoke the license by removing your content, which is a silver lining.

~~~
mrkurt
Most of this is just defining the scope of distribution.

Sublicensable is, perhaps, scary -- but it let's them legally allow other
entities to distribute the content. This seems necessary for, say, RSS feeds
if they want to let others use the content in aggregators.

The mediums (lower case m) all make sense, a "best of Medium" coffee table
book is still distribution, and likely reasonable? I am actually curious what
their general user expectations are for this type of thing. Note that this is
clarifying language, though, the right to distribute doesn't imply a specific
medium ... so they would be getting the same thing even without being
explicit.

"Utilize all copyright rights" does include creation of derivative works,
which would be an interesting thing for Medium to try and do (and probably go
counter to what users would expect). I think that's the only one of the
copyright rights that's "weird" for these terms.

The "anything else that is reasonably appropriate" clause let's them do stuff
that's not normally in the scope of copyright. Reasonable is a legally
restrictive word and would actually give power to what their user base
generally finds fair. It really seems more like cover-your-butt language than
a significantly larger scope.

------
tzs
Most of that is pretty standard. However, this part seems overly broad:

    
    
       license to utilize all copyright rights now in
       existence or that may arise in the future
       with respect to your User Content
    

So if someone published an article on Medium speculating on what would happen
if a United State Marine expeditionary unit was unexpectedly transported back
to Rome in the time of Augustus Caesar [1], Medium could write a screenplay
and shop it around Hollywood, and if it sold they wouldn't even have to pay
the author anything?

In the United States, the copyright owner of a copyrighted work has these
exclusive rights [2]:

1\. to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies.

2\. to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted works.

3\. to distribute copies of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or
other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.

4\. to perform the copyrighted work publicly.

5\. to display the copyrighted work publicly.

I can see Medium needing a royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable license
to do #1, #3, and maybe #5.

I don't see a need for them to have any #4 rights. For example, if someone
publishes a play on Medium I don't see why Medium would need the right to
perform that play publicly.

I don't see any need for them to have #2 rights. I can see that they might
want to do things like publish collections of the best of Medium, but doing
that would require exercising the copying right (#1) and the distribution
right (#3), not the derivative work right (#2). When you include a copy of a
work in a larger work, such as an anthology, you are not making a derivative
work--you are making a collective work [3]:

    
    
       A “collective work” is a work, such as a periodical
       issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number
       of contributions, constituting separate and independent
       works in themselves, are assembled into a collective
       whole.
    

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome)

[2]
[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106)

[3]
[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101)

~~~
kemayo
Okay, but Reddit could do that to the Rome Sweet Rome thing, too. Their TOS
has the same set of rights granted, spelled out even more explicitly:

>>> Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy, you agree
that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any
other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a
royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to
use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute,
publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium
(now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including
commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.[1]

I guess that what I'm saying here is that this clause is not in the least bit
uncommon.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/wiki/useragreement](http://www.reddit.com/wiki/useragreement)

EDIT: In fact, I noticed after posting this that the Rome Sweet Rome wikipedia
article has a section about "Licensing Issues", talking about reddit's TOS.
(Plus general content contributed by other users.)

------
dpweb
An article linked to Medium, about Medium, to get people to talk about Medium,
on Medium, which you are not allowed to write for, and keeps ownership of
everything created by those who are allowed to write for. I can see the
appeal.

~~~
quadrangle
right to use is _not_ ownership. Ownership is a misplaced metaphor for things
like articles.

------
yetanotherjosh
There is irony in multiple dimensions here. By publishing an article critical
of itself but whose core argument actually has very small teeth, Medium gets
to appear magnanamous and balanced and thus receives a net benefit in
reputation. And likewise on the author's side, with one hand the he condemns
that writing for Medium benefits Medium more than it benefits him, but with
the other hand he reaps the clear benefit of the notoriety gained from
publishing it on Medium. It's all a very clever scarf trick.

------
moepstar
At first, i thought "Hey, what an idiot - why does this take me to medium
then?".

But then i actually read it and i agree - everyone should read the ToS of a
service they use, but sadly most people don't.

And therefore are mostly surprised when i tell them that $service owns every
word, photo and whatnot they publish on it.

What really bugs me is that most people you tell are really indifferent to
this. They plainly don't care that they gave up every right on, say, a photo
they made to a megacorp - this should change.

~~~
thrownaway2424
You don't give up every right or even any right. You retain all your rights.
But you have to give medium (or google or whomever) a license to redistribute
what you wrote, otherwise they cannot do so and it's pointless to have written
it using that service.

~~~
josephwegner
But why do we have to give them that right to redistribute? Using github, or
even better your own server, the service doesn't gain any right to
redistribute my content.

~~~
mrkurt
Because Medium is, by definition, redistributing your content every time
someone loads up the article. They just distributed the parent article to me.
If they sold the company, the acquirer also needs to distribute the content
(transferable).

Github's terms grant them the same ability, just not as explicitly.

------
tzs
I don't understand why in the quote from Medium's terms of service he chose to
bold "non-exclusive".

~~~
josephwegner
That bolding is from Medium's terms. I did not add the formatting.

------
pseut
These articles kind of miss the appeal of something like medium. If you have a
blog and/or an audience, you probably don't want to use medium very often; but
if you have something to write that you think might appeal to a broader
audience medium might get you more publicity.

I mean, if you have your own blog, why write an op ed for the New York Times?
Why write a comment on HN? Why do a TV interview? Why write or speak anywhere
but your own website? Because many of those [ah, fuck, how do I choose another
word than] media can reach a bigger or different audience than your website,
spreading your ideas, increasing your reputation, etc.

The other nontrivial factor for medium specifically is for people who want to
write something every few months or so. They're unlikely to build an audience
for their own blog, but if they write on medium they might get read.

------
pmiller2
He's got a real point here. Medium helps you drive traffic to... Medium. From
a personal branding POV, you're probably better off with even a free Wordpress
site. (Though, really, if you want to control your online presence, you should
definitely host your own blog. It's not hard or expensive.)

~~~
smacktoward
The uniform look of Medium sites also pushes value in their direction instead
of yours. When I view an article on Medium, I always look at the same-as-
every-other-page-on-Medium design and think "oh, this is Medium" rather than
"oh, this is <insert author's name here>."

------
wavesounds
I wish all these posts didn't look the same. Honestly the same exact layout on
every single one is so boring now that I just figure the articles are just as
boring, which they usually are. Its like reading the wannabe New Yorker
without any cartoons. /rant

------
Kiro
What's so good about the Medium editor?

------
tk999
I want to build a SAAS based licensing sub module for existing blogging
platforms (does not matter it is wordpress, blogger, or your own website) as
long as your integrate with the licensing SAAS platform, you can license your
content. Anybody interested in something like that? Idea and discuss about
welcome.

------
dsowers
This is the exact reason why I built Silvrback. If you haven't seen it yet
(was on HN a couple weeks ago), here it is:
[https://www.silvrback.com/dsowers/introducing-
silvrback](https://www.silvrback.com/dsowers/introducing-silvrback)

Shipping soon.

~~~
nthnclrk
I loved the idea, but like Logdown (posted on here today), they're hosted. I'd
really love something like an amalgam of both services but self-hosted.

------
lindseybateman
This can help the numerous of people that asked your help for a static website

[http://blog.wercker.com/2013/07/25/Using-wercker-to-
publish-...](http://blog.wercker.com/2013/07/25/Using-wercker-to-publish-to-
GitHub-pages.html)

------
clarky07
They need a license to display the content, and if they ever want to sell the
site they need to be able to transfer it. Seems reasonable to me. They made it
non-exclusive so you can still own it, and even publish it elsewhere if I'm
reading it right.

------
lingben
I had no idea that medium owned the content. When it started, I read on HN
that medium was a platform like wordpress.com but now it is clear that that is
not true at all.

What are people on medium thinking then? or do they simply not know better?

------
sergiotapia
Wasn't this exact same post posted here a couple of weeks ago?

~~~
josephwegner
Nope - I just wrote this this evening. Perhaps someone else had similar ideas.

~~~
nether
[https://medium.com/writers-on-
writing/336300490cbb](https://medium.com/writers-on-writing/336300490cbb)

~~~
dangoldin
There's also [http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left-
medium/](http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left-medium/)

Not on Medium but relevant to this discussion.

------
drjacobs
There was basically the same article on medium a few weeks ago titled
something like "A shiny content farm is still a content farm". I have to
agree... not really new.

------
prezjordan
The service Medium provides is that people will actually read what you write.
If you've already built an audience, then it's probably not for you.

------
loteck
So, how is Silvrback development coming along, I wonder?

