“HackerNoon is leaving Medium, but also trying to take rights for people's work”

> Does being on Medium really give you that much in the way of foot traffic or networking effect?

Don't disagree with your points but as someone who publishes on Medium I think the answer to the above question is yes.

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.

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.

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...

Contrast that with 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.

I think we can be sure they won't do it because of GDPR.