Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 121 posts

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

#91

Post by smooke »

rchaud wrote: post #78
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.

David from Hackernoon here. I am thankful Medium (as it used to be) existed. I wish they didn't give up on empowering people to build their own sites. But their new business model is interesting and I wish them the best, it just has nothing to do with empowering people to build their own sites.

In our own small way, this is how I see the relationship: https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060

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

#92

Post by detaro »

rchaud wrote: post #76
whalesalad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 login…

Or they go to someone like Dreamhost where you can get a hosting package with domain and Wordpress already installed from one company. As much as I enjoy fuzzing about with my server, if you need "a website", a VPS should not be your first target.

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

#93

Post by detaro »

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…

Don't those publications still have the problem that people (e.g. here on HN, where it's the only thing visible) just see a "medium.com" domain, and not an identity that can stand out? Or are those publications getting exceptions from the "we don't do custom domains anymore" crap medium pulled a while ago?

The domain you publish on is a strong signal. Not having your own both means your beholden to the platform your on (i.e. it'd be a lot more painful for Hackernoon to move somewhere else if they'd kill all their links etc in the process), and that you share the reputation with everyone else on that domain - which for medium.com is between mixed and fairly bad by now.

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

#94

Post by smooke »

Veen wrote: post #23
duxup wrote: post #11

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?

The issue is that there is no “part of Hackernoon”. There’s just Medium. Hackernoon used Medium as a publishing platform, but really they’re just a grouping of Medium content with no special ownership or rights over the content. An unfortunate position for a publisher to be in.

The key here is that hacker noon publishes exclusively on hackernoon.com, and the majority of our contributors have agreed to continuing doing so.

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

#96

Post by smooke »

bluedino wrote: post #6

I'm in the minority, but I like Medium. But HN is just buzzword bingo and any good content they had (2 years ago) is gone.

Hey David from Hackernoon here. I liked Medium too. I just wish they hadn't given up on empowering others to build great sites. The good content from 2 years ago is still there https://hackernoon.com/archive , and I think top stories still has some good reads today https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home

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

#97

Post by smooke »

libria wrote: post #19
smooke wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol i was on twitter

Precisely what a HackerNews bot would say...

I AM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM THE FUTURE https://giphy.com/gifs/friend-stay-cSBOKwfGbKmg8

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

#98

Post by smooke »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #57
jondubois wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see the same dynamic but credit the exact reverse. Hacker Noon accumulated followers by aggregating articles that were already published on Medium. They were publishing 30 articles a day without adding any editorial value. That got the flywheel going where since they were a big publication, authors would submit directly to them. But all they did was aggregate Medium users and authors without adding any additional v…

FYI - Tony is medium advisor. Unsure why he is making it his job to make uninformed comments like this. This is David from Hackernoon, letting you know that without the use of Medium at my last job, I recruited, edited and published 400+ contributing writers with the use of Wordpress. When I started there, the company started with no brand, 5 employees and barely any seed money. When I left, it had 120 employees, $60M+ in Venture capital, a brand everyone in the recruiting space knew, and I couldn't publish contributors fast enough. Medium helped grow Hacker Noon, but if what Tony is saying were true, there would be thousands of publications just as big as Hacker Noon building with Medium's content management system. Also, most stories published with us are not already on Medium, we have to painstakingly onboard them to be a Medium writer while Medium does little to distribute any of our stories anymore. We've spent thousands of work hours educating people on ppl on how to use this content management system.

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

#99

Post by smooke »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #61
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…

I finally black listed (blocksite'd) medium because of their UI. Black listing helps me remember not to click on attractive/interesting links to medium hosted articles.

David from Hackernoon. We won't be doing a pop up ad to force login or a paywall on Hacker Noon 2.0. Hope you can consider us as an exemption from your blacklist!

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

#100

Post by smooke »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #88
smooke wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey Tony for the equity crowdfunding campaign we were vetted by 3rd party accountants and 3rd party lawyers. We published hundreds of pages of information will full financials and risks. You can find it here: https://www.startengine.com/hackernoon

Interesting that you think I raise money dishonestly, while Equity Crowdfunding is the only form of funding that publicly discloses all kinds of information for EVERYONE, not just the wealthy. For private raise, these kinds of info would typically be, well, private.

A short overview of the misinformation here:

$ I've been very upfront with my investors about what Medium is saying to me. Just a month ago Medium wrote that they wanted to cooperate on archiving past hacker noon on a hacker noon subdomain. Would you like me to forward you the email? But I've come to learn that when working with Medium, its best to hedge your bets. Well over half of our library have already explicitly opt-ed into Medium free terms with us. And I think its the better half. We also have been recruiting great content that we haven't published yet. Either way, our long term success will not be determined by content from the past; it'll be about how good or bad of a site we have going forward. And as Ev says "publishers and writers are free to move from Medium at any time" so there shouldn't be any problem here, but there is: https://twitter.com/DavidSmooke/status/1105522935349952512

$ Pageviews is not our metric. We don't need 8M pageviews to make far more $$$ than we are making now b/c Medium blocked our ability to run sponsors on our site (while running their own pop up ads). And we can open up new revenue streams. already this year we have podcast and events revenue.

Anyways, you think you're right and are willing to spend your time shouting about it. In a different time, I think we would have really liked building media together. You've made some cool things and have worked with some remarkable ppl - but I am just going to see you as another guy writing for his own vested interest. All the best. - David

Post reply on HN