
“HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work” - waffle_ss
https://twitter.com/ow/status/1105450808580231170
======
owenwil
I posted this thing on Twitter, but just to be clear about what's going on
here: they've replied and said their terms of service were not really intended
to be harsh, they don't want your content, and that they'll revise them
([https://twitter.com/ow/status/1105462220517969920](https://twitter.com/ow/status/1105462220517969920)).
One day when Twitter actually implements tweet editing, these types of threads
can start with a bit more clarity.

That said: Medium, as an independent writer, has supported me more than any
news organization ever has. They currently pay top-of-market rates, on time,
and pitch me stories/opportunities regularly. I haven't had a positive
relationship with a media company like this in a long while, and it really
seems like the work they're doing is making positive moves in the
community/content you see as well.

It's hard to know who to side with here, because betting on a platform as a
business is a really bad idea, and Medium has pivoted _a lot_ in the past, but
at least they're trying to build a better model for both the reader _and_ the
writer of the content.

~~~
jondubois
I wrote several software development articles for Hacker Noon on Medium and I
was able to accumulate a decent number of followers. I feel that Hacker Noon
contributed the most value in terms of reaching the right users. Medium just
capitalizes preexisting network effects and adds no real value.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I see the same dynamic but credit the exact reverse. Hacker Noon accumulated
followers by aggregating articles that were already published on Medium. They
were publishing 30 articles a day without adding any editorial value. That got
the flywheel going where since they were a big publication, authors would
submit directly to them.

But all they did was aggregate Medium users and authors without adding any
additional value.

~~~
smooke
FYI - Tony is medium advisor. Unsure why he is making it his job to make
uninformed comments like this. This is David from Hackernoon, letting you know
that without the use of Medium at my last job, I recruited, edited and
published 400+ contributing writers with the use of Wordpress. When I started
there, the company started with no brand, 5 employees and barely any seed
money. When I left, it had 120 employees, $60M+ in Venture capital, a brand
everyone in the recruiting space knew, and I couldn't publish contributors
fast enough. Medium helped grow Hacker Noon, but if what Tony is saying were
true, there would be thousands of publications just as big as Hacker Noon
building with Medium's content management system. Also, most stories published
with us are not already on Medium, we have to painstakingly onboard them to be
a Medium writer while Medium does little to distribute any of our stories
anymore. We've spent thousands of work hours educating people on ppl on how to
use this content management system.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I'm speaking as a publisher on medium. You know that David.

~~~
jondubois
It's true that initally, Hacker Noon was just picking articles that were
already published. My point still stands though that this added a lot of value
for me as a content producer because those same articles didn't get much
attention before they were included in Hacker Noon.

Then I started publishing straight to Hacker Noon because I knew that my
article would for sure at least get a couple of thousand reads no matter what;
and the most useful articles ended up getting almost 100K reads (highly
trageted too; almost all software developers). I don't think it could have
happened without Hacker Noon.

As an open source developer who spent thousands of hours working on a project
without making profit from it, I can attest that in the current system, it
does not matter who does the actual work. It's who can capitalize on that work
who takes the profit. I'm pretty sure that Medium has profited from hundreds
of open source projects as well. There is no point to try to moralize this.

------
StevePerkins
I guess I just don't read enough clickbait swill. I had never even heard of
"HackerNoon" until 30 seconds ago, and the fact that people refer to it as
"HN" (just like Hacker News) is a bit confusing and annoying.

At any rate, there doesn't appear to be anything too scandalous here. Some
"brand entity" was curating content submissions, hosted on Medium. The curator
decides to start hosting their own CMS site, and asks submitters for
permission to re-publish submissions at the new place. Submitters obviously
don't have to grant this opt-in if they don't want to. The end. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

The only noteworthy item here is the sillyness of "brand entities" trying to
use someone else's "platform" to bootstrap themselves. If you start off as a
Facebook page, or YouTube channel, or whatever... it could be bumpy when you
reach the scale of wanting to self-host your own site instead. That's the
trade-off for having used that original host for its "foot traffic" benefits
at the outset.

However, while Facebook/Reddit/etc makes sense for bootstrapping meme content,
and YouTube makes sense for bootstrapping video content... for the life of me
I cannot understand why anyone NEEDS Medium to get a print blog off the
ground. It's PRINT, for goodness sake! The easiest and cheapest thing in the
world to self-host. Does being on Medium really give you that much in the way
of foot traffic or networking effect? I always find Medium posts by way of
links from Hackers News or Reddit. I don't think I've ever gone to Medium
simply to browse around and stumble across things.

~~~
egypturnash
yeah, there was nothing about a rights grab in that letter from Hacker Noon at
all, wtf.

I've seen links to HNoon semi-regularly here on HNews for the past couple
years, fwiw.

~~~
btown
The devil's in the details, here.

Here's Medium's relevant terms of service: _You own the rights to the content
you create and post on Medium._ By posting content to Medium, you give us a
nonexclusive license to publish it on Medium Services, including anything
reasonably related to publishing it (like storing, displaying, reformatting,
and distributing it). In consideration for Medium granting you access to and
use of the Services, you agree that Medium may enable advertising on the
Services, including in connection with the display of your content or other
information. We may also use your content to promote Medium, including its
products and content. We will never sell your content to third parties without
your explicit permission. [https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-
service-9db0094a1e...](https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-
service-9db0094a1e0f)

Contrast that with
[https://terms.hackernoon.com/](https://terms.hackernoon.com/) : We may use
Your Content in a number of different ways, including by publicly displaying
it, reformatting it, incorporating it into advertisements and other works,
creating derivative works from it, promoting it, distributing it, and. As
such, you confirm and warrant that you own or control all rights to Your
Content and hereby irrevocably grant us world-wide, perpetual, non-exclusive,
royalty-free, assignable, sub-licensable, transferable rights to use Your
Content for any purpose. Please note that you also irrevocably grant the Users
of the Site the right to access Your Content in connection with their use of
the Site. Finally, you irrevocably waive, and cause to be waived, against
Company and its Users any claims and assertions of moral right or attribution
with respect to Your Content.

Typos aside, HNoon is asserting far more rights than just "we're getting the
same terms that Medium got when you first posted there." Particularly, I
believe (IANAL), the waiver of attribution claims against _other users_ of
HNoon means you are effectively releasing your work into the public domain, to
be used without attribution by anyone who finds it through HNoon.

To the extent that HNoon was trying to "sneak this through" with their
friendly message to authors, it's a scumbag move. It's good that they're
updating their language, and hopefully they change enough.

~~~
smooke
Hey Btown, David from Hacker Noon here. Thank you for feedback on our terms of
service. We are trying to make a simple non-exclusive license, and don't have
as large of a legal budget as maybe we should. There are mistakes in these
terms. We will be updating our terms to make it more clear that contributors
can remove their content at any time and contributors will always be
accredited (and fix the typos). We are not trying to sneak anything through,
just want a medium-free nonexclusive license to keep content where it is on
hackernoon.com

------
mattnewport
I don't know what Medium is like for writers but it certainly doesn't feel
like a better model for me as a reader. I'm reluctant to click on links to
Medium on HN at this point because of their incessant nagging and popups for
me to register.

~~~
lukewrites
No, Medium, let's not make it official.

~~~
Freak_NL
When someone wants to _make it official_ , I expect them to want to marry,
sue, hire, or fuck me. None of these is what I expect to be offered when
reading a blog.

I don't know why the wording of that message irritates me so much, but I can't
imagine many people would appreciate it.

~~~
braythwayt
Way OT, but there's also a referee who does MMA who after giving the fighters
their formal instructions, always says, "Now touch gloves and let's make it
official."

------
danols
Medium will be a better place without Hackernoon's clickbaity & shallow
articles.

That being said, Medium has broken its platform with the aggressive roll out
of premium. I guess it depends on which categories you are interested in but
for knowledgeable and in-depth tech articles the best articles are not written
by authors looking to earn a couple of dollars as a side gig.

They are written by people that wants to create a profile for themselves
and/or as content marketing for a company. A star marker is rarely an
indication of a very in depth article and is never written by a true expert in
the subject. These authors just don't write with the incentive to make money
from the content itself.

Medium.com used to be a create recommendation engine for quality & related
content. Now the recommendations are garbage full of clickbaity & shallow
articles with a star marker. And their search is terrible and lacking in basic
features like time filtering/sorting. When you search now you get many 2-3
year old articles in fast changing tech subjects which are completely
uninteresting. A great search and ability to build some feeds/channels is
actually a feature I would pay for.

Maybe other niches creates different experiences but for tech it is not a
platform worth exploring beyond the article you came for via a twitter link.

~~~
smooke
Hey Danols, David from Hacker Noon here. Publishing is a hard business. While
I don't agree with everything you said, I do like you believe that the best
stuff to read is from the expert themselves. Sometimes the articles we publish
are too shallow (we will work to improve quality), and other times we're able
to achieve a better place to read (by publishing top tech professionals
[https://hackernoon.com/archive/](https://hackernoon.com/archive/)).

~~~
rchaud
Hi David,

The link you posted, when sorted by 'Latest', becomes a pretty damning
indictment of what HackerNoon today appears to be, which is a low-grade
content mill masked by a few really great, impactful articles. Most of the
content however wouldn't be out of place at Huffington Post or Forbes.com.

* "3 Programming Languages to learn in 2019"

* "12 JS Concepts that will Level up Your skills"

* "6 things to know when self-studying Machine Learning"

This is the worst kind of SEO keyword stuffing you expect to see from bloggers
on LinkedIn, not a reputable publication. Just my 2 cents. I hope you are able
to clean up the shallow content, but it doesn't seem like a very deep pool to
begin with.

~~~
smooke
As a site gets larger, quality control is tough, and the irony is, having SEO
content makes it easier for the best content on your site to have better
distribution. With more control of collections, tag pages and topic pages in
hacker noon 2.0, I think we find strong SEO in other areas.

I will say if you pick the 3 best of today, the experience is a bit better:

"Why are we (still) sending so much web traffic unencrypted over the
Internet?" [https://hackernoon.com/why-are-we-still-sending-so-much-
web-...](https://hackernoon.com/why-are-we-still-sending-so-much-web-traffic-
unencrypted-over-the-internet-383317b758ec)

"Going Global (or Globally Local)? How Netflix Produces Amazing Global
Content"[https://hackernoon.com/going-global-or-globally-local-how-
ne...](https://hackernoon.com/going-global-or-globally-local-how-netflix-
produces-amazing-global-content-5ad98d0a5ff1)

"The Future of Robotics Development with Eva Li of Vincross"
[https://hackernoon.com/the-future-of-robotics-development-
wi...](https://hackernoon.com/the-future-of-robotics-development-with-eva-li-
of-vincross-dd8d85256d4e)

And as a site who's rooting for every day tech story (as opposed to
professional writing), there will be some bar to raise. Thank you for your 2
cents. Creating a better version of LinkedIn Publisher for the technology
community would be a better site than we are today.

------
nickjj
For anyone thinking about publishing anything on Medium, here's a little
story:

Since day 1 I self hosted my blog, starting about 3.5 years ago.

About a year ago I read about how much of an SEO boost and new eyes I would
get by re-publishing my articles on Medium (with canonical URLs pointing back
to my site) and it sounded good on paper. Medium is essentially a marketplace
for blogs and can act as a way to promote your articles...

...but the reality is, Medium won't really do anything at all to drive traffic
to your Medium articles. The only articles you ever see trending on the front
page or in the Medium newsletter is when a Medium article happens to gain a
ton of external traction. That traction usually happens when YOU (as the
content creator) are either famous and drive your own traffic to it, or you
wrote something good and other people are linking your Medium article around
the internet.

In both cases, Medium does nothing here to help you. You could have posted the
same article on your site instead.

About a year ago I republished about 20 of my most popular blog posts on
Medium and got around 200 hits over 6 months on all of the articles combined.
I never sent any traffic to those pages and never linked to them from
anywhere. I just let Medium do its thing. Meanwhile just 1 of those articles
alone gets 5x that traffic in 1 day on my own site. I've long pulled all of my
republished posts off Medium and will never (re)publish anything again on that
platform.

Do yourself a favor and just self host your own blog.

~~~
macspoofing
This comes up every-time YouTube tweaks their algorithm and some YouTubers
lose some number of views. It always seems like creators expect the platform
to drive traffic to their blog/channel/creative work/etc. when in reality the
creator is ultimately responsible for doing the legwork of marketing.

~~~
EamonnMR
I think what the platform offers isn't so much advertising as the veneer of
legitimacy you get from users seeing a familiar layout.

------
browniefed
HackerNoon is a bit of a scam. They started by requesting hundreds of people
post on their publication through a Medium feature that has since been
removed.

They would take sponsorships, and have made some significant cash built on the
back of people publishing their content on HackerNoon for mediocre exposure.

HackerNoon broke a lot of stuff laid out in the TOS. There is a big battle
going on with the whole Medium + Publication sphere which I have some inside
knowledge of.

Overall Medium is a whatever platform, and HackerNoon just is just making
money off other peoples content.

~~~
tonystubblebine
IMO, Hacker Noon's scam went completely over the top when they tried to raise
investment money from their readers. A huge headline in their prospectus was
getting 8M page views per month. But there was no discussion of this obvious
risk, which is that they don't own the copy right to most of their work. So
the new site is going to be getting much less than 8M views.

~~~
smooke
Hey Tony from Medium, David from Hacker Noon here. We are proudly funded by
1.2k readers, what's wrong with that? Instead of raising money from VCs, we
want to be accountable to the people who actually value Hacker Noon. Obviously
you don't and won't.

~~~
tonystubblebine
IMO, you've opened yourself up to lawsuits from all of your investors by
hiding material information about your risks. If you launch a new site with
fewer than 8M page views, your investors should ask why. And if the answer is
that you weren't able to port your back catalog to your new site because you
don't have rights to those articles, your investors should ask if you knew
this ahead of time. And if you did, they should consider suing you.

I know this "Tony from Medium" is your attempt to say that I'm speaking for
Medium. I'm not. I have a bag of potential biases here including a small
amount of Medium stock, shared investors with Medium, Medium's CEO was my boss
in 2005, my cofounder and one of my former employees both now work at Medium,
etc. But my main bias is posted elsewhere in these threads. I own and operate
Better Humans and have a publishing partnership with Medium. I labeled that
somewhere else as Medium dumping a pile of money on us. If I was speaking as a
representative of Medium, I'd say that. I'm speaking as myself and as someone
who has a lot of publishing experience.

Plus, none of those potential biases have anything to do with the facts of
your prospectus. If you raised that money dishonestly, you're taking on a lot
of risk to yourself for no good reason.

~~~
smooke
Hey Tony for the equity crowdfunding campaign we were vetted by 3rd party
accountants and 3rd party lawyers. We published hundreds of pages of
information will full financials and risks. You can find it here:
[https://www.startengine.com/hackernoon](https://www.startengine.com/hackernoon)

Interesting that you think I raise money dishonestly, while Equity
Crowdfunding is the only form of funding that publicly discloses all kinds of
information for EVERYONE, not just the wealthy. For private raise, these kinds
of info would typically be, well, private.

A short overview of the misinformation here:

$ I've been very upfront with my investors about what Medium is saying to me.
Just a month ago Medium wrote that they wanted to cooperate on archiving past
hacker noon on a hacker noon subdomain. Would you like me to forward you the
email? But I've come to learn that when working with Medium, its best to hedge
your bets. Well over half of our library have already explicitly opt-ed into
Medium free terms with us. And I think its the better half. We also have been
recruiting great content that we haven't published yet. Either way, our long
term success will not be determined by content from the past; it'll be about
how good or bad of a site we have going forward. And as Ev says "publishers
and writers are free to move from Medium at any time" so there shouldn't be
any problem here, but there is:
[https://twitter.com/DavidSmooke/status/1105522935349952512](https://twitter.com/DavidSmooke/status/1105522935349952512)

$ Pageviews is not our metric. We don't need 8M pageviews to make far more $$$
than we are making now b/c Medium blocked our ability to run sponsors on our
site (while running their own pop up ads). And we can open up new revenue
streams. already this year we have podcast and events revenue.

Anyways, you think you're right and are willing to spend your time shouting
about it. In a different time, I think we would have really liked building
media together. You've made some cool things and have worked with some
remarkable ppl - but I am just going to see you as another guy writing for his
own vested interest. All the best. - David

~~~
mercer
I gotta say this entire HN thread leaves me with a negative impression of both
'David from Hacker Noon' and 'Tony from Medium'. More the latter than the
former, but honestly I can't tell.

Mostly I'm left thinking the 'drama' in here is entirely befitting the general
quality of both properties. I generally find Medium and Hacker Noon links to
be somewhat underwhelming whenever they're posted to this here HN.

~~~
smooke
Thanks for the honesty Mercer, looking forward to moving past this and just
focusing on making my site better.

------
briandoll
For anyone else trying to move off Medium - it's more complicated than it
sounds (there is no single chronological index of your content, for example) -
we wrote up some tips and tools we used recently:
[https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-02-27-some-tips-
on-m...](https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-02-27-some-tips-on-migrating-
from-medium)

~~~
iamjustlooking
Seems like a good idea to check for and try any export tools before adding
content to a system. Furthermore if the site provides the export tool there's
no guarantee they wont take it away or modify it.

~~~
didgeoridoo
The best approach is to keep your source of truth out of the Medium platform
from the start. You can use the "import post" functionality to tag your
original off-Medium post as the canonical one, which gives you the best of
both worlds: Medium discoverability plus full control over your content.
[https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/214550207-Import-a...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post)

------
heyyyouu
I don't know why they wouldn't have done their own Website to start with. It's
not hard, at all. This arrangement put way, way too much power into a
partner's hand. Also not clarifying rights before you publish something is
just a seriously rookie move. Rule of thumb is that nothing gets published
until you have the author rights agreement signed.

~~~
SilasX
“We’re just not all that good with webserver config, or coding, or tinkering,
or...”

‘Aren’t y’all hackers?’

Reminds me of Bojack Horseman:

“Sorry, I’m just not suited for these therapy sessions. I’m not good at using
words to express conditions or emotions.”

‘Aren’t you a professional writer?’

~~~
smooke
hahaha

------
smooke
Wanted to clarify why Hacker Noon had to move off Medium. Here’s why:

1\. Medium decided it no longer wanted to support independent publications of
curators and writers like us, The Awl (RIP), The Ringer, and others. 2\.
Medium at one point allowed publications to monetize using promotions, but
arbitrarily decided to cut those off earlier last year, which cut off many
independent curators and publications from their sole revenue stream. 3\. At
the same time, Medium put ads on every page of our site, including pop up ads.

Hacker Noon 2.0 sent an email to contributors asking if they wanted to join
our new community, and in exchange Hacker Noon asks for a non-exclusive
license to the content, just like Medium. Contributors can remove the content
at any time.

In the move to our new infrastructure, we will work hard to make sure links
don’t break (which is what will happen now for Hacker Noon content still on
Medium), never put any story behind a paywall, and be the best and most up-
front amplify button for all people writing great tech content.

We’ve taken your feedback on the existing ToS for Hacker Noon and will be
updating that soon. We are independent writers and curators ourselves, so we
have no interest in owning your content.

We’re here to build a great community, and we hope you’ll join us. Thanks for
your help and support.

Back to the Internet!

-David Smooke

~~~
tonystubblebine
> Medium decided it no longer wanted to support independent publications of
> curators and writers like us.

This is so misleading.

I run an independent publication, Better Humans, that is a little smaller than
Hacker Noon. Our experience has been the exact opposite, which is that Medium
came to us and dumped a pile of money on us to ramp up what we were doing.

The reality is that Medium has been directly making a move toward higher
quality for two years. Publications that can make the switch are getting
supported and publications that can't are getting pushed off.

There was a hugely successful group of aggregator-style publications that
focused on aggregating articles without paying particular attention to
quality. When you think of a publication off of Medium you often have editors
reading each article, asking for revisions, making revisions themselves, doing
copy edits. The aggregators, often just 1 or 2 people, were publishing 30
articles a day without doing any of that quality control.

It was an effective growth hack for how Medium was put together. And once
these publications got popular enough, they became the go to place for authors
to submit articles.

HackerNoon and the other pubs who followed this hack have had two years to
adjust to Medium's pivot into a premium pay wall. Everything Medium's been
talking about is about quality.

So the publications who are getting pushed out are the ones who wouldn't make
the shift from quantity to quality. I wasn't a HackerNoon reader, but the
reviews in this HackerNews thread about shallow clickbait are damning. That
type of article is just wasting your reader's time and all readers should be
excited about Medium withdrawing support for that type of publishing.

On the flip side, the economics of a publication that Medium does want to
support are amazing. We get paid per page view and make more than most of our
peers in traditional online media even though our costs don't include an ad-
sales team, building distribution, or hosting. That leaves a lot of economic
margin to do a deep story edit (often a couple of hours) and a copy edit.

~~~
minimaxir
> I run an independent publication, Better Humans, that is a little smaller
> than Hacker Noon. Our experience has been the exact opposite, which is that
> Medium came to us and dumped a pile of money on us to ramp up what we were
> doing.

I was under the impression that there were two types of pubs on Medium: One
like HackerNoon which only aggregates/reposts content, and another which was
subsidized by Medium to produce original, quality content. (the lack of
success of the latter causing a business model pivot, which also breaks the
former)

~~~
tonystubblebine
Latter being subsidized? I think the confusion is just that Medium pivoted so
many times.

So they subsidized pubs like Matter and then walked away from that. That
happened before they had a paywall.

And now they're paying pubs like Better Humans. It sort of feels like being
subsidized because they're willing to pay up front based on what they think
you'll grow to. But it's really ends up being a partnership where they are
cutting you in on their revenue (the expectation is that both sides will make
a profit).

They're just not very far along on understanding this partner pubs model.

But I think you'll be seeing a lot more of it. And part of making the switch
is not having low quality publications stealing eyeballs from their higher
quality pubs.

~~~
smooke
It's great to hear that Medium deemed some publications worth dumping money
into - more funded media outlets is awesome! This isn't a zero sum game. But
any publication with one paying customer is taking on TREMENDOUS risk. The
reality is the community and not the wealthy should determine what media
exists. Medium killed the ability for publications to have their readers pay
to subscribe to them [https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/medium-
publication.php](https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/medium-publication.php)
and killed the ability for publications to run sponsorship (while continuing
to run pop up ads on content they didn't own). It was an interesting tradeoff
but I am done with it.

------
turtlegrids
Oh how I miss the days of simple self-publishing from your WYSIWYG html editor
direct to a cheap VPS.

Why's everything gotta be so complicated?

~~~
detaro
You can still do that if that's what you want? Putting a website online isn't
any harder today than in the past.

~~~
whalesalad
I think the OP is referring to the social conditioning we've had to prefer
content platforms like Medium. Plus, most people starting out don't want to
deal with the stateful hell that is configuring a DO/Linode box for WP.
Regardless, Hackernoon should have left Medium as soon as they found traction.

~~~
rchaud
There's a lot of legwork to do (relatively speaking) to get a simple FTP
server up and running. The UI/UX of domain registrar sites are horrible and
filled with dark patterns to upsell you to email hosting, Whois protection,
cloud storage, etc. A non-technical person without any webmaster experience
might give up here, understandably.

Even if they soldier on, they'll find themselves needing to maintain separate
logins for your registrar account, your Wordpress account, your MySQL account
(if you decided to install Wordpress) and at no point does the registar site
make any of this clear. At least it's not too much work to point the domain
towards your server's IP address.

On DigitalOcean, I had to do all of the above, plus rewrite my .htaccess files
for prettified URLs since whatever worked on localhost did not work when the
files were sitting on a droplet.

Finally, at the end of the day, people are loath to pay $10/mo for web hosting
because that's as much as a Netflix subscription, and they had to do all the
heavy lifting themselves.

~~~
detaro
Or they go to someone like Dreamhost where you can get a hosting package with
domain and Wordpress already installed from one company. As much as I enjoy
fuzzing about with my server, if you need "a website", a VPS should not be
your first target.

------
JeremyBanks
HackerNoon has consistently published bad-faith clickbait garbage and slander.
Assume that their description here is similarly misleading.

~~~
PascLeRasc
I agree. Just last week on HN(ews) someone asked what the most popular Medium
blog was and I was about to say HackerNoon just from seeing it everywhere, but
when I went to their site it was all low-quality articles about putting your
Tesla on the blockchain.

~~~
smooke
Hey PascLeRasc, we're doing some work to improve quality, but it is a tough
nut to crack. It starts with more editors. We onboarded 4 so far this year
[https://hackernoon.com/meet-the-new-hacker-noon-
editors-b375...](https://hackernoon.com/meet-the-new-hacker-noon-
editors-b37508a3e771) We're working on an activity feed of some form in 2.0,
showing you when an editor has opened, edited, then published your story, and
we’ll continue to build on that with feedback from the community. We've also
been curating our favorites here [https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-
stories/home](https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home)

------
snazz
Interesting. I’m hoping that most contributors will accept licensing their
content to the new website, because decentralization is good. The Medium email
seemed a little disingenuous in how it called HackerNoon a “container”.

~~~
browniefed
Technically that is all publications are. A container of posts. HackerNoon
invited people to their publication to "grow a community" when in fact it's
pretty much been profiting off free content with 0 hosting costs and a $70
one-time DNS hookup to medium.

~~~
smooke
David from Hackernoon here. We've actually been using Medium as our content
management system for so long there was no fee at all. They wanted to cover
the fee to recruit more publications. While we haven't paid for hosting, it
has come at a tremendous cost (to name a few: medium has our reader data, our
subscribers email addresses, and runs many pop up create an account ads that
very much hurt our bounce rate). Tradeoff was our own little version of this
[https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060177021953806342](https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060177021953806342)
Although we also wont be paying for hosting for the next year or so b/c we got
a grant from GCP [https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-platform-hacker-
noon-2ba...](https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-platform-hacker-
noon-2ba28a29512f) But ultimately, high traffic sites need to be smart about
hosting fees, and I think our upcoming setup will be a good balance between
calling the app and surfacing content from CDN. Personally, I don't think
domains and people can be classified as containers, but word choice is an art
and I certainly feel dehumanized by that one.

------
forrestthewoods
I left Medium too. No regrets.

[https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/saying_goodbye_to_mediu...](https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/saying_goodbye_to_medium/)

------
CM30
This whole debacle is really about whether submitting to a publication on
Medium counts as giving the publication rights to your work (at least to
display/post it), or whether they merely curate work elsewhere.

Personally I'd say HackerNoon probably shouldn't even need to ask here, since
by submitting their work to the publication users have indicated they want
HackerNoon to have the right to feature it on their domain. After all, if
Hacker News moved to 'hackernews.com', they wouldn't need to mass mail the
entire userbase asking for permission to carry over comments, and the same
would go for many other sites. Wikis don't ask every time they move
hosting/domain name, nor do most forums, social networks, multi author blogs,
etc.

The way Medium has responded reminds me a bit of Proboards and their attitude
towards migrations away; that users have agreed to sign up with the service
rather than the individual forum and that the forum owner doesn't have rights
to the content itself.

I'd disagree with and so would a lot of people, but there are technically
arguments both ways.

Either way, it all really comes down to A: who you think the users are dealing
with when it comes to publications on third party platforms, and B: whether a
publication or sub site on such a service gets a license to take its content
elsewhere later on.

------
yangustin
I actually don't understand the big fuss. Hackernoon was a publication on
Medium. They asked writers for opt-in to republish content. Some writers were
confused. Medium sent an email clarifying writers right. Writers can decide
whether to give consent or not - all good.

The only problem I have is with the language Medium used: "moving content." If
Medium is indeed the platform, publications should NOT have the ability to
"move" content. They can delete their publication, but articles should remain
on Medium and all existing links should redirect to the article. I believe
this is the case, which means the language is deceptive.

If this is NOT the case, then the product has a big problem.

~~~
smooke
It's about keeping content on the URL it is currently on.

------
fareesh
Apart from the infrastructure and application, what benefits does Medium
provide? Is it the discovery of your content via the links at the bottom? Is
that considered the killer feature?

Is there some kind of solution that exists where self-hosted bloggers can send
traffic to each other, like the link sharing networks of the old days?

~~~
rchaud
> Apart from the infrastructure and application, what benefits does Medium
> provide?

The ability to spin up your own "digital media company" as Hackernoon has
done, with close to no setup costs.

~~~
smooke
David from Hackernoon here. I am thankful Medium (as it used to be) existed. I
wish they didn't give up on empowering people to build their own sites. But
their new business model is interesting and I wish them the best, it just has
nothing to do with empowering people to build their own sites.

In our own small way, this is how I see the relationship:
[https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060](https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060)

------
duxup
I'm missing a connection here.

Were people writing for Hackernoon on Medium... but they weren't part of
Hackernoon and now Hackernoon wants to use that content elsewhere?

~~~
vngzs
HackerNoon allows open contributors[0], but they have licensed their content
to appear in accordance with Medium's terms of use. Since HackerNoon wishes to
move off Medium's platform, HackerNoon must get content creators to accept
their own terms of use instead of Medium's.

[0]: [https://contribute.hackernoon.com/](https://contribute.hackernoon.com/)

~~~
duxup
Ah that makes sense thank you.

Also seems like, yeah that's not a good way to actually own any content.

------
FrankDixon
What exactly is the unique selling proposition of medium?

------
MooshuBeef
Got the email from Medium and was confused cause I also thought they were
talking about Hacker News, at a glance.

------
crh225
For those going to miss HackerNoon on Medium, meet SlackerNoon!

[https://medium.com/slackernoon/meet-the-
slacks-5bcb9dacdaf6](https://medium.com/slackernoon/meet-the-
slacks-5bcb9dacdaf6)

~~~
smooke
David from Hackernoon here - to admit that I have been bested! Brilliant
stuff!!!

------
stefan_
So HackerNoon is like those YouTube partnership networks.

~~~
minimaxir
The opposite: the YouTube MCNs of yore made you sign a contract for
redistribution rights with explicit statements of ownership, which is not the
case here.

------
terrycody
anyone tell me is it free of Hacknoon 2.0 or behind a paywall?

------
bluedino
I'm in the minority, but I like Medium. But HN is just buzzword bingo and any
good content they had (2 years ago) is gone.

~~~
smooke
Hey David from Hackernoon here. I liked Medium too. I just wish they hadn't
given up on empowering others to build great sites. The good content from 2
years ago is still there
[https://hackernoon.com/archive](https://hackernoon.com/archive) , and I think
top stories still has some good reads today [https://hackernoon.com/editors-
top-tech-stories/home](https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home)

------
dmuth
I will note that I favorited the tweet, and within _seconds_ David Smooke
followed me.

That timing seems just a little... odd.

~~~
tylerhou
Maybe he happened to be on Twitter?

~~~
subcosmos
Most likely explanation. Someone wanting a bot to be less obvious would use a
delay.

~~~
smooke
lol i was on twitter

~~~
libria
Precisely what a HackerNews bot would say...

~~~
smooke
I AM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM THE FUTURE [https://giphy.com/gifs/friend-
stay-cSBOKwfGbKmg8](https://giphy.com/gifs/friend-stay-cSBOKwfGbKmg8)

~~~
jayzalowitz
_Pats david on the head_ sure you are buddy.

