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

Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 71 posts

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#51

Post by perfectstorm »

_ps6d wrote: post #37
propter_hoc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Deimorz, are you the same /u/Deimorz who used to be an admin on reddit? I'm very interested to read this perspective from you. Do you think there is a viable third way forward for companies like Medium and reddit?

That's me, yes. And you're setting me up so perfectly here that I almost feel guilty about it: A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.t…

> including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads

What are your plans when user-supported revenue is not enough to keep the servers running?

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#52

Post by lol768 »

oldgun wrote: post #9

It's not a single case. The whole company is built on an exploitive and nefarious business model. https://hackernoon.com/why-is-hackernoon-com-leaving-medium-... https://praxis.fortelabs.co/why-im-leaving-medium/

So .. did Hacker Noon leave or not? https://hackernoon.com still displays a Medium message.

I've not watched the video, there doesn't appear to be a transcript.

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#53

Post by Deimorz »

perfectstorm wrote: post #51
_ps6d wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's me, yes. And you're setting me up so perfectly here that I almost feel guilty about it: A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.t…

> including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads What are your plans when user-supported revenue is not enough to keep the servers running?

The current level of donations is already over 5x what's needed to pay for the server expenses, and it can probably handle 100x the traffic.

"Sustainable" is a much easier goal than needing to be worth billions of dollars to make your investors happy.

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#54

Post by Scoundreller »

perfectstorm wrote: post #51
_ps6d wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's me, yes. And you're setting me up so perfectly here that I almost feel guilty about it: A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.t…

> including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads What are your plans when user-supported revenue is not enough to keep the servers running?

I’m still surprised that I can’t donate my resources toward a distributed DB/web server for this kind of content. E.g. by subscribing, I automatically start serving content and/or augmenting other mirrors. As some channels I subscribe to become stale, I automatically start re-assigning my resources to keep it alive.

Basically a BitTorrent/Tor-like decentralized system for distribute DBs with a web front end.

The amount of server resources I consume from fora must be 1/10000th the excess CPU/HD/bandwidth capacity I have.

I’m sure some cryptocoin project is working on something like this.

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#55

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

richrichardsson wrote: post #45
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook hasn't figured this out with in-video ads. I don't care that much about how Tasty makes some baked good enough to sit through a 15-second ad to see the remainder of the video.

I make a habit of stopping the video as soon as I see the "Ad will start in X seconds" notice, in the vain hope that someone is paying attention to those metrics.

You're not alone: I do the same thing.

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#56

Post by efuquen »

quincyla wrote: post #13

Please delete this post. This is a private email I sent to the author. It was not intended to be shared on Twitter. We just want to move on and focus on the future.

I get you wrote something to a limited audience and didn't expect it to be shared beyond. But you really should consider any communication with a 'a few authors' as something that could possibly be shared with the whole world, even if you had said it was confidential, which wasn't even the case.

If you want this to blow over the best thing to do here is not say anything. The fact you are trying to 'silence' something that is clearly beyond the point of silencing looks bad in multiple ways (a bit naive, trying to control speech).

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#57

Post by quanticle »

user00012-ab wrote: post #18

I don't think Medium has fully grasped that people read most content because they are bored, not because they really care about the content; thus when you put the content behind a paywall, most people will just go find other ways to amuse their bored brains on the internet. Content on the internet is usually so shallow it's bordering near worthless; lots of people just repeating other people over and over. When it co…

>Paying for a book is worth it, as the book is actually a complete thought.

On the other hand, there are so many books out there that could be a (long) blogpost, or series of articles, but are filled with mindless repetition, just to pad out the wordcount to have a book-sized publication.

There used to be a type of publication called a pamphlet, which was longer than a magazine article, but shorter than a book. It was what we'd call a "longread" today. Medium is trying, however ineptly, to try to bring back that market segment.

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#58

Post by gnicholas »

throwaway13000 wrote: post #32

Lets say I am a random dude writing one off blog on medium.com. Will the user be still subjects to "5 free articles" per month? Will user be subjected to "Lets make things official" or is the quota only for firewall/paywalled articles?

If you don't opt-in to monetizing your posts, then they are not subject to the quota. I believe Medium will still show the pop-ups to get people to subscribe, but they won't ever actually be blocked from reading your posts.

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#59

Post by gnicholas »

> Then they started threatening us with a lawyer

On what grounds would legal threats have been made? Would this be related to freeCodeCamp posting articles (possibly without author agreement, according to recent allegations) separately? If it happened before freeCodeCamp left, then obviously it would have to be something else, but I can't think of what.

Re: Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

#60

Post by moate »

tchaffee wrote: post #50

Why is this post still here? The original author of the email - Quincy Larson - said it was a private email. Sure the tweet is already available at archived links. That doesn't mean we can't be respectful of the wishes of the original author of a leaked private email. Especially someone who has put so much time and hard work into running a small non-profit helping people learn to code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Partially this.

And while it's possible this post will go down, there's also a worthwhile discussion to be had about Medium. Some things are bigger than Quincy might want them to be (I say this as someone who's a HUGE fan of FCC and what they do).

Post reply on HN