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

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

#71

Post by tonystubblebine »

smooke wrote: post #14

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 so…

> 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.

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

#72

Post by smooke »

btown wrote: post #47
egypturnash wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

smooke wrote: post #60
danols wrote: post #53

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 cr…

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/ ).

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by tonystubblebine »

rchaud wrote: post #55
mattnewport wrote: post #37

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.

Whereas I'm reluctant to click Medium.com links because I have no idea if the article is from a publication with paid writers, or from the armies of self-styled "thought leaders" and "life-hackers" dumping their blogspam on Medium just as they do with Inc.com, Forbes.com and the like.

I've been working to help Medium with this. They get journalism and have an excellent internal team run by the former EIC at Time. But they don't get expert publications, i.e. pubs run by subject matter experts.

I'd put together a self-improvement publication, Better Humans, based on what I'd learned working at O'Reilly during the heyday of O'Reilly books. Those were books for programmers written by programmers and edited by programmers. As a result, you could really trust what you were reading.

In our pub, there's a prohibition around publishing any summaries. The author has to have 1st hand experience. And then there's a serious editing pass from someone else who's pretty experienced.

All of that is economically feasible because of Medium's paywall. But so far, nobody has done the equivalent Programmer version of this.

I got to talk to Medium about why and my theory was that it's twofold. Publishers don't trust that this is the final pivot and also they don't really know how to run an editorial pipeline. We were fast to figure it out because we'd spent so much time working in publishing (the other Better Humans editor is also former O'Reilly and Make).

But I know it's possible and I'm trying to help Medium get more publications like this off the ground. When I looked at the existing ecosystem, I pushed away from even looking at HackerNoon and looking more at FreeCodeCamp. What would their articles look like with tighter editing at the acquisition, article, and copy stages? I think it would be a pretty great experience.

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

#75

Post by minimaxir »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #71
smooke wrote: post #14

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 so…

> 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…

> 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)

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

#76

Post by rchaud »

whalesalad wrote: post #13
detaro wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.

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.

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

#77

Post by tonystubblebine »

minimaxir wrote: post #75
tonystubblebine wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 o…

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.

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

#78

Post by rchaud »

fareesh wrote: post #34

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?

> 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.

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

#79

Post by smooke »

rchaud wrote: post #67
smooke wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ ).

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 wh…

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-...

"Going Global (or Globally Local)? How Netflix Produces Amazing Global Content"https://hackernoon.com/going-global-or-globally-local-how-ne...

"The Future of Robotics Development with Eva Li of Vincross" https://hackernoon.com/the-future-of-robotics-development-wi...

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.

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

#80

Post by smooke »

Macha wrote: post #30
egypturnash wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I thought Hacker Noon was a first party Medium product, especially when it constituted approximately all paywalled medium articles I saw.

Please let us know which paywalled articles you have seen? We want all our content to be free for all. Medium did a design switch recently where authors have to uncheck a box as so a story is not paywalled. Hacker Noon 2.0 won't put a paywall in front of any writer's story.
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