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?
“HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
11–20 of 121 posts
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#12I left Medium too. No regrets.
https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/saying_goodbye_to_mediu...
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#13Oh 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?
You can still do that if that's what you want? Putting a website online isn't any harder today than in the past.
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.
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#14Wanted 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
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#15Interesting. 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”.
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#16I 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.
The reason why is because Medium used to have a messaging feature for publications. You could request a story be apart of your publication.
Many publications would promise they'll promote your stuff, etc. So after messaging hundreds of people you start getting free content and bigger reach, etc.
So existing platform + ease of poaching content for views is the real reason.
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still do that if that's what you want? Putting a website online isn't any harder today than in the past.
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.
Re configuring servers: Shared hosting is still a thing, as are dozens of companies that will run your wordpress/... for you. There's degrees of complexity vs flexibility you can choose from.
But I think you are right, Hackernoon immensely benefited from being on Medium and how easy they could "take over" articles - I remember quite often seeing an article making the rounds under the author's account, and then a few hours later being blasted out everywhere under hackernoon.com. That wouldn't have happened without the integrated nature of medium (but as a consumer also didn't add anything for me). And medium provided all that for free.
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#18I'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?
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.
Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#19Re: “HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”
#20For 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...