11 ms·

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

147 points by waffle_ss 8y ago

turtlegrids 8y ago
Oh how I miss the days of simple self-publishing from your WYSIWYG html editor direct to a cheap VPS. Why's everything gotta be so complicated?
- frenchie4111 8y ago
  In order to make things look simpler, we have to make them more complicated
- detaro 8y ago
  You can still do that if that's what you want? Putting a website online isn't any harder today than in the past.
  - whalesalad 8y ago
    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.
    - detaro 8y ago
      Re configuring servers: Shared hosting is still a thing, as are dozens of companies that will run your wordpress/... for you. There's degrees of complexity vs flexibility you can choose from. But I think you are right, Hackernoon immensely benefited from being on Medium and how easy they could "take over" articles - I remember quite often seeing an article making the rounds under the author's account, and then a few hours later being blasted out everywhere under hackernoon.com. That wouldn't have happened without the integrated nature of medium (but as a consumer also didn't add anything for me). And medium provided all that for free.
    - rchaud 8y ago
      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.
      - detaro 8y ago
        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.
- KerrickStaley 8y ago
  I use GitHub Pages + Jekyll to host my blog, and it works pretty well. It's free and I don't have to do any administration work or worry about load. It's also trivial to port to another platform (e.g. VPS). https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://www.kerrickstaley.com/ https://www.kerrickstaley.com/
dmuth 8y ago
I will note that I favorited the tweet, and within seconds David Smooke followed me. That timing seems just a little... odd.
- tylerhou 8y ago
  Maybe he happened to be on Twitter?
  - subcosmos 8y ago
    Most likely explanation. Someone wanting a bot to be less obvious would use a delay.
    - smooke 8y ago
      lol i was on twitter
      - libria 8y ago
        Precisely what a HackerNews bot would say...
        smooke 8y ago
        I AM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM THE FUTURE https://giphy.com/gifs/friend-stay-cSBOKwfGbKmg8 https://giphy.com/gifs/friend-stay-cSBOKwfGbKmg8
        jayzalowitz 8y ago
        Pats david on the head sure you are buddy.
      - tylerhou 8y ago
        The timing of this comment is a bit suspicious.
bluedino 8y ago
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.
- smooke 8y ago
  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 https://hackernoon.com/archive , and I think top stories still has some good reads today https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home
heyyyouu 8y ago
I don't know why they wouldn't have done their own Website to start with. It's not hard, at all. This arrangement put way, way too much power into a partner's hand. Also not clarifying rights before you publish something is just a seriously rookie move. Rule of thumb is that nothing gets published until you have the author rights agreement signed.
- browniefed 8y ago
  The reason why is because Medium used to have a messaging feature for publications. You could request a story be apart of your publication. Many publications would promise they'll promote your stuff, etc. So after messaging hundreds of people you start getting free content and bigger reach, etc. So existing platform + ease of poaching content for views is the real reason.
- SilasX 8y ago
  “We’re just not all that good with webserver config, or coding, or tinkering, or...” ‘Aren’t y’all hackers?’ Reminds me of Bojack Horseman: “Sorry, I’m just not suited for these therapy sessions. I’m not good at using words to express conditions or emotions.” ‘Aren’t you a professional writer?’
  - smooke 8y ago
    hahaha
- smacktoward 8y ago
  Medium's pitch was that they would drive traffic from other sites/publications/etc. in their network to yours. So by being in the network, you would get a free promotional boost you wouldn't get by setting up a standalone web site. (Of course it eventually turned out that the size of this boost was not as big as many anticipated it would be, which dampened the appeal of being in the network somewhat.)
duxup 8y ago
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?
- vngzs 8y ago
  HackerNoon allows open contributors[0], but they have licensed their content to appear in accordance with Medium's terms of use. Since HackerNoon wishes to move off Medium's platform, HackerNoon must get content creators to accept their own terms of use instead of Medium's. [0]: https://contribute.hackernoon.com/ https://contribute.hackernoon.com/
  - duxup 8y ago
    Ah that makes sense thank you. Also seems like, yeah that's not a good way to actually own any content.
- Veen 8y ago
  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.
  - smooke 8y ago
    The key here is that hacker noon publishes exclusively on hackernoon.com, and the majority of our contributors have agreed to continuing doing so.
    - Veen 8y ago
      “Hackernoon.com” is a domain. Nothing is published on a domain. It’s published on a server or platform the domain points to. In the case of Hackernoon, that platform was Medium. Medium is the publisher, the hackernoon editors were doing unpaid work for Medium.
forrestthewoods 8y ago
I left Medium too. No regrets. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/saying_goodbye_to_medium/ https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/saying_goodbye_to_mediu...
smooke 8y ago
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 sole revenue stream. 3. At the same time, Medium put ads on every page of our site, including pop up ads. Hacker Noon 2.0 sent an email to contributors asking if they wanted to join our new community, and in exchange Hacker Noon asks for a non-exclusive license to the content, just like Medium. Contributors can remove the content at any time. In the move to our new infrastructure, we will work hard to make sure links don’t break (which is what will happen now for Hacker Noon content still on Medium), never put any story behind a paywall, and be the best and most up-front amplify button for all people writing great tech content. We’ve taken your feedback on the existing ToS for Hacker Noon and will be updating that soon. We are independent writers and curators ourselves, so we have no interest in owning your content. We’re here to build a great community, and we hope you’ll join us. Thanks for your help and support. Back to the Internet! -David Smooke
- lumens 8y ago
  For those without full context, this comment is by Hacker Noon's CEO ^^
- tonystubblebine 8y ago
  > 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.
snazz 8y ago
Interesting. I’m hoping that most contributors will accept licensing their content to the new website, because decentralization is good. The Medium email seemed a little disingenuous in how it called HackerNoon a “container”.
- browniefed 8y ago
  Technically that is all publications are. A container of posts. HackerNoon invited people to their publication to "grow a community" when in fact it's pretty much been profiting off free content with 0 hosting costs and a $70 one-time DNS hookup to medium.
  - smooke 8y ago
    David from Hackernoon here. We've actually been using Medium as our content management system for so long there was no fee at all. They wanted to cover the fee to recruit more publications. While we haven't paid for hosting, it has come at a tremendous cost (to name a few: medium has our reader data, our subscribers email addresses, and runs many pop up create an account ads that very much hurt our bounce rate). Tradeoff was our own little version of this https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060177021953806342 https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060177021953806342 Although we also wont be paying for hosting for the next year or so b/c we got a grant from GCP https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-platform-hacker-noon-2ba28a29512f https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-platform-hacker-noon-2ba... But ultimately, high traffic sites need to be smart about hosting fees, and I think our upcoming setup will be a good balance between calling the app and surfacing content from CDN. Personally, I don't think domains and people can be classified as containers, but word choice is an art and I certainly feel dehumanized by that one.
briandoll 8y ago
For anyone else trying to move off Medium - it's more complicated than it sounds (there is no single chronological index of your content, for example) - we wrote up some tips and tools we used recently: https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-02-27-some-tips-on-migrating-from-medium https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-02-27-some-tips-on-m...
- iamjustlooking 8y ago
  Seems like a good idea to check for and try any export tools before adding content to a system. Furthermore if the site provides the export tool there's no guarantee they wont take it away or modify it.
  - didgeoridoo 8y ago
    The best approach is to keep your source of truth out of the Medium platform from the start. You can use the "import post" functionality to tag your original off-Medium post as the canonical one, which gives you the best of both worlds: Medium discoverability plus full control over your content. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...
  - 3into10power5 8y ago
    I think we can be sure they won't do it because of GDPR.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Buried in the settings somewhere is a zipball of all of your content you can download. I wrote a tool you can feed it to which generates a Jekyll blog for you: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify Note: don't do what briandoll did and skip the Google Analytics, please.
StevePerkins 8y ago
I guess I just don't read enough clickbait swill. I had never even heard of "HackerNoon" until 30 seconds ago, and the fact that people refer to it as "HN" (just like Hacker News) is a bit confusing and annoying. At any rate, there doesn't appear to be anything too scandalous here. Some "brand entity" was curating content submissions, hosted on Medium. The curator decides to start hosting their own CMS site, and asks submitters for permission to re-publish submissions at the new place. Submitters obviously don't have to grant this opt-in if they don't want to. The end. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The only noteworthy item here is the sillyness of "brand entities" trying to use someone else's "platform" to bootstrap themselves. If you start off as a Facebook page, or YouTube channel, or whatever... it could be bumpy when you reach the scale of wanting to self-host your own site instead. That's the trade-off for having used that original host for its "foot traffic" benefits at the outset. However, while Facebook/Reddit/etc makes sense for bootstrapping meme content, and YouTube makes sense for bootstrapping video content... for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone NEEDS Medium to get a print blog off the ground. It's PRINT, for goodness sake! The easiest and cheapest thing in the world to self-host. Does being on Medium really give you that much in the way of foot traffic or networking effect? I always find Medium posts by way of links from Hackers News or Reddit. I don't think I've ever gone to Medium simply to browse around and stumble across things.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  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.
  - Macha 8y ago
    Honestly I thought Hacker Noon was a first party Medium product, especially when it constituted approximately all paywalled medium articles I saw.
    - smooke 8y ago
      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.
browniefed 8y ago
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 + Publication sphere which I have some inside knowledge of. Overall Medium is a whatever platform, and HackerNoon just is just making money off other peoples content.
- tonystubblebine 8y ago
  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.
  - smooke 8y ago
    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.
    - tonystubblebine 8y ago
      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.
owenwil 8y ago
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 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 independent writer, has supported me more than any news organization ever has. They currently pay top-of-market rates, on time, and pitch me stories/opportunities regularly. I haven't had a positive relationship with a media company like this in a long while, and it really seems like the work they're doing is making positive moves in the community/content you see as well. It's hard to know who to side with here, because betting on a platform as a business is a really bad idea, and Medium has pivoted _a lot_ in the past, but at least they're trying to build a better model for both the reader _and_ the writer of the content.
- lukewrites 8y ago
  That's interesting to hear. Out of curiosity, how much writing do you do on Medium vs other places (eg a personal, non-medium blog)? I'm in the process of resurrecting my own blog, and I've been wondering about how much I should blog on other platforms for readership/exposure as opposed to my own self-hosted blog.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  >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 of business overnight if the processors decided to cut them off.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    >Uber/Lyft are hopelessly dependent on iOS and Android At least uber isn't, and maybe more recently lyft also moved out. You can use the uber mobile website to hail cabs. I don't have google play services or the uber app.
MooshuBeef 8y ago
Got the email from Medium and was confused cause I also thought they were talking about Hacker News, at a glance.
fareesh 8y ago
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?
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  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.
  - smooke 8y ago
    We're about to see if that's true in Hacker Noon 2.0 :-)
    - EamonnMR 8y ago
      Some of that hurdle may have already been overcome by the Hacker Noon branding on the medium site. But do write up your findings!
- rchaud 8y ago
  > 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.
  - smooke 8y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060
mattnewport 8y ago
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.
- lukewrites 8y ago
  No, Medium, let's not make it official.
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    When someone wants to make it official, I expect them to want to marry, sue, hire, or fuck me. None of these is what I expect to be offered when reading a blog. I don't know why the wording of that message irritates me so much, but I can't imagine many people would appreciate it.
    - braythwayt 8y ago
      Way OT, but there's also a referee who does MMA who after giving the fighters their formal instructions, always says, "Now touch gloves and let's make it official."
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    Gold :D
- rchaud 8y ago
  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.
  - tonystubblebine 8y ago
    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.
JeremyBanks 8y ago
HackerNoon has consistently published bad-faith clickbait garbage and slander. Assume that their description here is similarly misleading.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  I agree. Just last week on HN(ews) someone asked what the most popular Medium blog was and I was about to say HackerNoon just from seeing it everywhere, but when I went to their site it was all low-quality articles about putting your Tesla on the blockchain.
  - smooke 8y ago
    Hey PascLeRasc, we're doing some work to improve quality, but it is a tough nut to crack. It starts with more editors. We onboarded 4 so far this year https://hackernoon.com/meet-the-new-hacker-noon-editors-b37508a3e771 https://hackernoon.com/meet-the-new-hacker-noon-editors-b375... We're working on an activity feed of some form in 2.0, showing you when an editor has opened, edited, then published your story, and we’ll continue to build on that with feedback from the community. We've also been curating our favorites here https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home
nickjj 8y ago
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.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  This comes up every-time YouTube tweaks their algorithm and some YouTubers lose some number of views. It always seems like creators expect the platform to drive traffic to their blog/channel/creative work/etc. when in reality the creator is ultimately responsible for doing the legwork of marketing.
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    I think what the platform offers isn't so much advertising as the veneer of legitimacy you get from users seeing a familiar layout.
stefan_ 8y ago
So HackerNoon is like those YouTube partnership networks.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  The opposite: the YouTube MCNs of yore made you sign a contract for redistribution rights with explicit statements of ownership, which is not the case here.
danols 8y ago
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 create a profile for themselves and/or as content marketing for a company. A star marker is rarely an indication of a very in depth article and is never written by a true expert in the subject. These authors just don't write with the incentive to make money from the content itself. Medium.com used to be a create recommendation engine for quality & related content. Now the recommendations are garbage full of clickbaity & shallow articles with a star marker. And their search is terrible and lacking in basic features like time filtering/sorting. When you search now you get many 2-3 year old articles in fast changing tech subjects which are completely uninteresting. A great search and ability to build some feeds/channels is actually a feature I would pay for. Maybe other niches creates different experiences but for tech it is not a platform worth exploring beyond the article you came for via a twitter link.
- trashcan_ 8y ago
  I really wish I noticed this before I dished out for premium. Was sadly disappointed when my inbox was just flooded with terrible, unsophisticated articles I don’t care much for.
- smooke 8y ago
  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/ https://hackernoon.com/archive/).
  - rchaud 8y ago
    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 when self-studying Machine Learning" This is the worst kind of SEO keyword stuffing you expect to see from bloggers on LinkedIn, not a reputable publication. Just my 2 cents. I hope you are able to clean up the shallow content, but it doesn't seem like a very deep pool to begin with.
FrankDixon 8y ago
What exactly is the unique selling proposition of medium?
crh225 8y ago
For those going to miss HackerNoon on Medium, meet SlackerNoon! https://medium.com/slackernoon/meet-the-slacks-5bcb9dacdaf6 https://medium.com/slackernoon/meet-the-slacks-5bcb9dacdaf6
- smooke 8y ago
  David from Hackernoon here - to admit that I have been bested! Brilliant stuff!!!
CM30 8y ago
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.
yangustin 8y ago
I actually don't understand the big fuss. Hackernoon was a publication on Medium. They asked writers for opt-in to republish content. Some writers were confused. Medium sent an email clarifying writers right. Writers can decide whether to give consent or not - all good. The only problem I have is with the language Medium used: "moving content." If Medium is indeed the platform, publications should NOT have the ability to "move" content. They can delete their publication, but articles should remain on Medium and all existing links should redirect to the article. I believe this is the case, which means the language is deceptive. If this is NOT the case, then the product has a big problem.
- smooke 8y ago
  It's about keeping content on the URL it is currently on.
terrycody 8y ago
anyone tell me is it free of Hacknoon 2.0 or behind a paywall?

147 points by waffle_ss 8y ago

Oh how I miss the days of simple self-publishing from your WYSIWYG html editor direct to a cheap VPS. Why's everything gotta be so complicated?

frenchie4111 8y ago
In order to make things look simpler, we have to make them more complicated
detaro 8y ago
You can still do that if that's what you want? Putting a website online isn't any harder today than in the past.
- whalesalad 8y ago
  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.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Re configuring servers: Shared hosting is still a thing, as are dozens of companies that will run your wordpress/... for you. There's degrees of complexity vs flexibility you can choose from. But I think you are right, Hackernoon immensely benefited from being on Medium and how easy they could "take over" articles - I remember quite often seeing an article making the rounds under the author's account, and then a few hours later being blasted out everywhere under hackernoon.com. That wouldn't have happened without the integrated nature of medium (but as a consumer also didn't add anything for me). And medium provided all that for free.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    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.
    - detaro 8y ago
      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.
KerrickStaley 8y ago
I use GitHub Pages + Jekyll to host my blog, and it works pretty well. It's free and I don't have to do any administration work or worry about load. It's also trivial to port to another platform (e.g. VPS). https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://github.com/kerrickstaley/kerrickstaley.github.io https://www.kerrickstaley.com/ https://www.kerrickstaley.com/

dmuth 8y ago

I will note that I favorited the tweet, and within seconds David Smooke followed me. That timing seems just a little... odd.

tylerhou 8y ago
Maybe he happened to be on Twitter?
- subcosmos 8y ago
  Most likely explanation. Someone wanting a bot to be less obvious would use a delay.
  - smooke 8y ago
    lol i was on twitter
    - libria 8y ago
      Precisely what a HackerNews bot would say...
      - smooke 8y ago
        I AM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM THE FUTURE https://giphy.com/gifs/friend-stay-cSBOKwfGbKmg8 https://giphy.com/gifs/friend-stay-cSBOKwfGbKmg8
        jayzalowitz 8y ago
        Pats david on the head sure you are buddy.
    - tylerhou 8y ago
      The timing of this comment is a bit suspicious.

bluedino 8y ago

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.

smooke 8y ago
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 https://hackernoon.com/archive , and I think top stories still has some good reads today https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home

heyyyouu 8y ago

I don't know why they wouldn't have done their own Website to start with. It's not hard, at all. This arrangement put way, way too much power into a partner's hand. Also not clarifying rights before you publish something is just a seriously rookie move. Rule of thumb is that nothing gets published until you have the author rights agreement signed.

browniefed 8y ago
The reason why is because Medium used to have a messaging feature for publications. You could request a story be apart of your publication. Many publications would promise they'll promote your stuff, etc. So after messaging hundreds of people you start getting free content and bigger reach, etc. So existing platform + ease of poaching content for views is the real reason.
SilasX 8y ago
“We’re just not all that good with webserver config, or coding, or tinkering, or...” ‘Aren’t y’all hackers?’ Reminds me of Bojack Horseman: “Sorry, I’m just not suited for these therapy sessions. I’m not good at using words to express conditions or emotions.” ‘Aren’t you a professional writer?’
- smooke 8y ago
  hahaha
smacktoward 8y ago
Medium's pitch was that they would drive traffic from other sites/publications/etc. in their network to yours. So by being in the network, you would get a free promotional boost you wouldn't get by setting up a standalone web site. (Of course it eventually turned out that the size of this boost was not as big as many anticipated it would be, which dampened the appeal of being in the network somewhat.)

duxup 8y ago

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?

vngzs 8y ago
HackerNoon allows open contributors[0], but they have licensed their content to appear in accordance with Medium's terms of use. Since HackerNoon wishes to move off Medium's platform, HackerNoon must get content creators to accept their own terms of use instead of Medium's. [0]: https://contribute.hackernoon.com/ https://contribute.hackernoon.com/
- duxup 8y ago
  Ah that makes sense thank you. Also seems like, yeah that's not a good way to actually own any content.
Veen 8y ago
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.
- smooke 8y ago
  The key here is that hacker noon publishes exclusively on hackernoon.com, and the majority of our contributors have agreed to continuing doing so.
  - Veen 8y ago
    “Hackernoon.com” is a domain. Nothing is published on a domain. It’s published on a server or platform the domain points to. In the case of Hackernoon, that platform was Medium. Medium is the publisher, the hackernoon editors were doing unpaid work for Medium.

forrestthewoods 8y ago

I left Medium too. No regrets. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/saying_goodbye_to_medium/ https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/saying_goodbye_to_mediu...

smooke 8y ago

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 sole revenue stream. 3. At the same time, Medium put ads on every page of our site, including pop up ads. Hacker Noon 2.0 sent an email to contributors asking if they wanted to join our new community, and in exchange Hacker Noon asks for a non-exclusive license to the content, just like Medium. Contributors can remove the content at any time. In the move to our new infrastructure, we will work hard to make sure links don’t break (which is what will happen now for Hacker Noon content still on Medium), never put any story behind a paywall, and be the best and most up-front amplify button for all people writing great tech content. We’ve taken your feedback on the existing ToS for Hacker Noon and will be updating that soon. We are independent writers and curators ourselves, so we have no interest in owning your content. We’re here to build a great community, and we hope you’ll join us. Thanks for your help and support. Back to the Internet! -David Smooke

lumens 8y ago
For those without full context, this comment is by Hacker Noon's CEO ^^
tonystubblebine 8y ago
> 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.

snazz 8y ago

Interesting. I’m hoping that most contributors will accept licensing their content to the new website, because decentralization is good. The Medium email seemed a little disingenuous in how it called HackerNoon a “container”.

browniefed 8y ago
Technically that is all publications are. A container of posts. HackerNoon invited people to their publication to "grow a community" when in fact it's pretty much been profiting off free content with 0 hosting costs and a $70 one-time DNS hookup to medium.
- smooke 8y ago
  David from Hackernoon here. We've actually been using Medium as our content management system for so long there was no fee at all. They wanted to cover the fee to recruit more publications. While we haven't paid for hosting, it has come at a tremendous cost (to name a few: medium has our reader data, our subscribers email addresses, and runs many pop up create an account ads that very much hurt our bounce rate). Tradeoff was our own little version of this https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060177021953806342 https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060177021953806342 Although we also wont be paying for hosting for the next year or so b/c we got a grant from GCP https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-platform-hacker-noon-2ba28a29512f https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-platform-hacker-noon-2ba... But ultimately, high traffic sites need to be smart about hosting fees, and I think our upcoming setup will be a good balance between calling the app and surfacing content from CDN. Personally, I don't think domains and people can be classified as containers, but word choice is an art and I certainly feel dehumanized by that one.

briandoll 8y ago

For anyone else trying to move off Medium - it's more complicated than it sounds (there is no single chronological index of your content, for example) - we wrote up some tips and tools we used recently: https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-02-27-some-tips-on-migrating-from-medium https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-02-27-some-tips-on-m...

iamjustlooking 8y ago
Seems like a good idea to check for and try any export tools before adding content to a system. Furthermore if the site provides the export tool there's no guarantee they wont take it away or modify it.
- didgeoridoo 8y ago
  The best approach is to keep your source of truth out of the Medium platform from the start. You can use the "import post" functionality to tag your original off-Medium post as the canonical one, which gives you the best of both worlds: Medium discoverability plus full control over your content. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...
- 3into10power5 8y ago
  I think we can be sure they won't do it because of GDPR.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Buried in the settings somewhere is a zipball of all of your content you can download. I wrote a tool you can feed it to which generates a Jekyll blog for you: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify Note: don't do what briandoll did and skip the Google Analytics, please.

StevePerkins 8y ago

I guess I just don't read enough clickbait swill. I had never even heard of "HackerNoon" until 30 seconds ago, and the fact that people refer to it as "HN" (just like Hacker News) is a bit confusing and annoying. At any rate, there doesn't appear to be anything too scandalous here. Some "brand entity" was curating content submissions, hosted on Medium. The curator decides to start hosting their own CMS site, and asks submitters for permission to re-publish submissions at the new place. Submitters obviously don't have to grant this opt-in if they don't want to. The end. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The only noteworthy item here is the sillyness of "brand entities" trying to use someone else's "platform" to bootstrap themselves. If you start off as a Facebook page, or YouTube channel, or whatever... it could be bumpy when you reach the scale of wanting to self-host your own site instead. That's the trade-off for having used that original host for its "foot traffic" benefits at the outset. However, while Facebook/Reddit/etc makes sense for bootstrapping meme content, and YouTube makes sense for bootstrapping video content... for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone NEEDS Medium to get a print blog off the ground. It's PRINT, for goodness sake! The easiest and cheapest thing in the world to self-host. Does being on Medium really give you that much in the way of foot traffic or networking effect? I always find Medium posts by way of links from Hackers News or Reddit. I don't think I've ever gone to Medium simply to browse around and stumble across things.

egypturnash 8y ago
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.
- Macha 8y ago
  Honestly I thought Hacker Noon was a first party Medium product, especially when it constituted approximately all paywalled medium articles I saw.
  - smooke 8y ago
    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.

browniefed 8y ago

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 + Publication sphere which I have some inside knowledge of. Overall Medium is a whatever platform, and HackerNoon just is just making money off other peoples content.

tonystubblebine 8y ago
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.
- smooke 8y ago
  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.
  - tonystubblebine 8y ago
    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.

owenwil 8y ago

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 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 independent writer, has supported me more than any news organization ever has. They currently pay top-of-market rates, on time, and pitch me stories/opportunities regularly. I haven't had a positive relationship with a media company like this in a long while, and it really seems like the work they're doing is making positive moves in the community/content you see as well. It's hard to know who to side with here, because betting on a platform as a business is a really bad idea, and Medium has pivoted _a lot_ in the past, but at least they're trying to build a better model for both the reader _and_ the writer of the content.

lukewrites 8y ago
That's interesting to hear. Out of curiosity, how much writing do you do on Medium vs other places (eg a personal, non-medium blog)? I'm in the process of resurrecting my own blog, and I've been wondering about how much I should blog on other platforms for readership/exposure as opposed to my own self-hosted blog.
jjeaff 8y ago
>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 of business overnight if the processors decided to cut them off.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  >Uber/Lyft are hopelessly dependent on iOS and Android At least uber isn't, and maybe more recently lyft also moved out. You can use the uber mobile website to hail cabs. I don't have google play services or the uber app.

MooshuBeef 8y ago

Got the email from Medium and was confused cause I also thought they were talking about Hacker News, at a glance.

fareesh 8y ago

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?

EamonnMR 8y ago
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.
- smooke 8y ago
  We're about to see if that's true in Hacker Noon 2.0 :-)
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    Some of that hurdle may have already been overcome by the Hacker Noon branding on the medium site. But do write up your findings!
rchaud 8y ago
> 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.
- smooke 8y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060

mattnewport 8y ago

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.

lukewrites 8y ago
No, Medium, let's not make it official.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  When someone wants to make it official, I expect them to want to marry, sue, hire, or fuck me. None of these is what I expect to be offered when reading a blog. I don't know why the wording of that message irritates me so much, but I can't imagine many people would appreciate it.
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    Way OT, but there's also a referee who does MMA who after giving the fighters their formal instructions, always says, "Now touch gloves and let's make it official."
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  Gold :D
rchaud 8y ago
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.
- tonystubblebine 8y ago
  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.

JeremyBanks 8y ago

HackerNoon has consistently published bad-faith clickbait garbage and slander. Assume that their description here is similarly misleading.

PascLeRasc 8y ago
I agree. Just last week on HN(ews) someone asked what the most popular Medium blog was and I was about to say HackerNoon just from seeing it everywhere, but when I went to their site it was all low-quality articles about putting your Tesla on the blockchain.
- smooke 8y ago
  Hey PascLeRasc, we're doing some work to improve quality, but it is a tough nut to crack. It starts with more editors. We onboarded 4 so far this year https://hackernoon.com/meet-the-new-hacker-noon-editors-b37508a3e771 https://hackernoon.com/meet-the-new-hacker-noon-editors-b375... We're working on an activity feed of some form in 2.0, showing you when an editor has opened, edited, then published your story, and we’ll continue to build on that with feedback from the community. We've also been curating our favorites here https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home https://hackernoon.com/editors-top-tech-stories/home

nickjj 8y ago

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.

macspoofing 8y ago
This comes up every-time YouTube tweaks their algorithm and some YouTubers lose some number of views. It always seems like creators expect the platform to drive traffic to their blog/channel/creative work/etc. when in reality the creator is ultimately responsible for doing the legwork of marketing.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  I think what the platform offers isn't so much advertising as the veneer of legitimacy you get from users seeing a familiar layout.

stefan_ 8y ago

So HackerNoon is like those YouTube partnership networks.

minimaxir 8y ago
The opposite: the YouTube MCNs of yore made you sign a contract for redistribution rights with explicit statements of ownership, which is not the case here.

danols 8y ago

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 create a profile for themselves and/or as content marketing for a company. A star marker is rarely an indication of a very in depth article and is never written by a true expert in the subject. These authors just don't write with the incentive to make money from the content itself. Medium.com used to be a create recommendation engine for quality & related content. Now the recommendations are garbage full of clickbaity & shallow articles with a star marker. And their search is terrible and lacking in basic features like time filtering/sorting. When you search now you get many 2-3 year old articles in fast changing tech subjects which are completely uninteresting. A great search and ability to build some feeds/channels is actually a feature I would pay for. Maybe other niches creates different experiences but for tech it is not a platform worth exploring beyond the article you came for via a twitter link.

trashcan_ 8y ago
I really wish I noticed this before I dished out for premium. Was sadly disappointed when my inbox was just flooded with terrible, unsophisticated articles I don’t care much for.
smooke 8y ago
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/ https://hackernoon.com/archive/).
- rchaud 8y ago
  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 when self-studying Machine Learning" This is the worst kind of SEO keyword stuffing you expect to see from bloggers on LinkedIn, not a reputable publication. Just my 2 cents. I hope you are able to clean up the shallow content, but it doesn't seem like a very deep pool to begin with.

FrankDixon 8y ago

What exactly is the unique selling proposition of medium?

crh225 8y ago

For those going to miss HackerNoon on Medium, meet SlackerNoon! https://medium.com/slackernoon/meet-the-slacks-5bcb9dacdaf6 https://medium.com/slackernoon/meet-the-slacks-5bcb9dacdaf6

smooke 8y ago
David from Hackernoon here - to admit that I have been bested! Brilliant stuff!!!

CM30 8y ago

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.

yangustin 8y ago

I actually don't understand the big fuss. Hackernoon was a publication on Medium. They asked writers for opt-in to republish content. Some writers were confused. Medium sent an email clarifying writers right. Writers can decide whether to give consent or not - all good. The only problem I have is with the language Medium used: "moving content." If Medium is indeed the platform, publications should NOT have the ability to "move" content. They can delete their publication, but articles should remain on Medium and all existing links should redirect to the article. I believe this is the case, which means the language is deceptive. If this is NOT the case, then the product has a big problem.

smooke 8y ago
It's about keeping content on the URL it is currently on.

terrycody 8y ago

anyone tell me is it free of Hacknoon 2.0 or behind a paywall?