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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”

#81

Post by rchaud »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #74
rchaud wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

What you're suggesting sounds like a good idea. FreeCodeCamp has a number of talented contributors, but maintaining a consistently high quality of content is hard when there's no real "brand/editorial voice".

Good to hear that there's a requirement to demonstrate real subject matter experience. Hopefully that cuts down on the volume of articles that are merely commentary on someone else's original researched work.

Step 2 would be to outright ban "link-bait" titles like "6 things that.." "Ultimate", "Start to finish guide" "2019", etc. I know for a fact that I used to read much, much more online when writers didn't editorialize the title to fit what they think would obtain the highest numbers of clicks and shares.

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

#83

Post by sofaofthedamned »

lukewrites wrote: post #42
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.

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

Gold :D

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

#84

Post by smooke »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #62
browniefed wrote: post #28

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 +…

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.

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.

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

#85

Post by tonystubblebine »

rchaud wrote: post #81
tonystubblebine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

What you're suggesting sounds like a good idea. FreeCodeCamp has a number of talented contributors, but maintaining a consistently high quality of content is hard when there's no real "brand/editorial voice". Good to hear that there's a requirement to demonstrate real subject matter experience. Hopefully that cuts down on the volume of articles that are merely commentary on someone else's original researched work. St…

The gist is just that editing is expensive. I think FCC is not going to move inside the paywall (maybe because they are limited by their name), but that there are going to be good programmer-focused pubs that spend heavily on editorial.

My reference for this is outdated, O'Reilly and then the old Railscast site. But I'm sure there is an appropriate middle ground that makes use of the new economics to do something valuable and high quality.

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

#86

Post by 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.

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

#87

Post by smooke »

jjeaff wrote: post #40
owenwil wrote: post #29

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 ). One day when Twitter actually implements tweet editing, these types of threads can start with a bit more clarity. That said: Medium, as an…

>betting on a platform as a business is a really bad idea I can't really think of any business that isn't built or at least highly reliant on someone else's platform right now. Uber/Lyft are hopelessly dependent on iOS and Android. And that goes for any business that is heavily reliant on their mobile app. Then everyone else is reliant at leadt on the credit card networks to process their payments. They would go out…

Hey David from Hackernoon here. The technology industry is very consolidated. It's easier to get a small business started, but when it grows, it's easier for another technology you depend on to change its terms. In my case, I was content running a bootstapped business that barely made enough to fund two jobs (hacker noon in 2017 & 2018), but my revenue stream was cut off by pivots from my content management system. With an enormous cost of switching, we turned to our readers to fund the movement into our own infrastructure: https://www.startengine.com/hackernoon Now, I have a small team, and win/lose/or-draw, I'm thrilled to have the future of my business not tied to the fate of medium.

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

#88

Post by tonystubblebine »

smooke wrote: post #84
tonystubblebine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#89

Post by smooke »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #77
minimaxir wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

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 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.

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

#90

Post by smooke »

EamonnMR wrote: post #69
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?

I think that some subset of users just won't engage with any content that isn't on a platform they already know, or appears to be on a shiny new platform of some kind.

We're about to see if that's true in Hacker Noon 2.0 :-)
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