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

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.