Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories • Hacker News Board

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#61

Post by EGreg » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

I never understood why people trust their data, identity and brand to others to have ultimate power over. Whether it's facebook.com/yourbrand or twitter.com/blah or medium.com/pleasedonthurtme

I realize that these days people may want something more than Wordpress, they want some social networking layer. So I did something about it. I opened a company and 7 years we worked on an open source platform to once and for all solve this stupid situation. Take a look and I'd be curious to get your feedback:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#62

Post by iDemonix » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #37

Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...). 1. Ghost i…

I'm a big fan of Ghost and have just set it up for a friend on free tier AWS for his travel blog.

DO droplets have gotten better/bigger lately, and with the one-click install it's a cinch. That said, if anyone's interested, I wrote a post on getting it running on a small VM which I'm currently rewriting for AWS free tier: https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean...

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#63

Post by gnbfulbvgjbvv » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

smg wrote: post #9

A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable. For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete contro…

What about github pages plus cloudflare? 100% free

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#64

Post by osteele » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

zby wrote: post #23

Hedja wrote: post #13

Always publish on your own platform then syndicate it across all the relevant social media providers to get exposure. It's a huge pain, especially now that most platforms are closed and don't provide automation (APIs, RSS), but it's really the most flexible solution. It also makes syndicating to new providers a lot less painful since you'll have some standard raw form (e.g. Markdown) which you can create a manual or…

The question is what is your platform? Does it require running your own server in your bedroom, hiring a virtual machine, or maybe even anything like hosted WordPress counts as yours, because you pay for it directly? And you know even if you run your own bedroom server - even then you still rely on some companies, be it your internet provider or even electricity provider, and theoretically you can be switched off if…

The “threat model” approach from security is useful here too. (Or Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery, if you're familiar with that domain, or want to learn it.)

What are the threats to your content availability — hosting provider censors you, hosting provider dies, your cloud servers die, your on-premise servers die or their storage is corrupted, your workstation dies or its storage is corrupted, you miss a bill, you lose your ability to pay bills at all?

How likely are these? What happens? How much do you care? How could you recover and re-publish your data? How quickly do you need to recover, if at all? How much (time, money) is it worth investing now, to reduce the risk of future data loss or the duration of an outage?

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#65

Post by minimaxir » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

rcthompson wrote: post #60

Reading further down the thread, it seems they were suspended for violation of Medium's policy on cryptocurrencies... despite the fact that they have never written about cryptocurrencies.

Medium has a policy on cryptocurrency? Given the amount of problematic thought pieces submitted to HN from it (and the no-so-subtle advertisements for the author’s own crypto), you wouldn’t know it.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#66

Post by steve_adams_86 » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #37

Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...). 1. Ghost i…

I'll add my recommendation here too. You can get going with it over at digital ocean with one of their single click images, whatever you call them, and run it fine for $5-$10 per month. I recommend $10, but I believe it'll still install and run fine for low traffic sites on the cheapest tier.

It's also really easy to install yourself. They've done a great job on it all around. If you have a blog, give it a shot. It's not a WordPress replacement if you use tons of plugins but it's great writing software.

It's also really easy to theme.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#67

Post by rcthompson » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #65

rcthompson wrote: post #60

Reading further down the thread, it seems they were suspended for violation of Medium's policy on cryptocurrencies... despite the fact that they have never written about cryptocurrencies.

Medium has a policy on cryptocurrency? Given the amount of problematic thought pieces submitted to HN from it (and the no-so-subtle advertisements for the author’s own crypto), you wouldn’t know it.

Here's the post where they quote the message Medium sent them: https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744414079487371

And here's the policy page it links to: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000646167

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#68

Post by srslack » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

hsljekskfh wrote: post #52

srslack wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons They threw out their integrity as a publishing platform when they updated their ToS a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431403 Indeed, there is not much of a point to their existence when they throw this away, other than being a virtue signalling magazine with unpaid authors that doesn't even…

The article you linked looks to be about how they banned someone who said that a shooting last month was a 'false flag' and the victims were paid actors... This is not the time this horrible false narrative has been applied to a shooting, alex jones promoted an identical story last year. These things are always actually about the alt-right getting kicked out of a service, they say the service is now dead and doesn't…

They banned several other people, iirc, who did not incite violence nor disinformation on their platform.

>argument doesn't hold on a private platform

Would you argue that Liberapay's banning was justified, here, in the context of this story?

>everyone else knows the positions are nonsense.

The cornerstone of a modern liberal democracy is not 'nonsense.' You just don't appreciate free speech, and thus cannot call yourself a liberal. And that's fine with me.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#69

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #37

Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...). 1. Ghost i…

[deleted]

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#70

Post by Zak » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #45

srslack wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons They threw out their integrity as a publishing platform when they updated their ToS a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431403 Indeed, there is not much of a point to their existence when they throw this away, other than being a virtue signalling magazine with unpaid authors that doesn't even…

> more speech, not less When speech can be automated, this turns into a question of who has the largest promotional bot army. True speech can be drowned out with an infinite array of conflicting lies.

Suppressing an automated service disruption or preventing the spread of spam is different from policing content on topical or ideological grounds.

Looking at reddit as an example, I don't like where this is headed. First they came for pedos and creepers, and I said nothing because ewww. Then they came for assholes and trolls, and I said nothing because good riddance. Now they've come for gun coupons, and I don't want to flee to Voat because it's dominated by assholes and trolls.