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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

What if I don't want to make money from my content? I just want to share it with the world, let them read it (or not read it) however they want, share it, copy it, comment on it, link to it.

That was the dream of the early internet, and with the centralised nature of Facebook, Google Groups it has faded.

It's easy enough for me as somebody technical. But what about my non-technical friends? They move to Medium, Facebook, Blogger, etc, as a way of hosting their content because it's easier.

WordPress is probably the remaining champion of the easy-to-use open web, and all we do is bitch about how slow and insecure it is.

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> What if I don't want to make money from my content?

That is perfectly fine and there is nothing that stands in your way of doing that - more power to you! There is a contingent who do not want to pay for, or view ads on content from publishers who would like to make money from their content (because it is their day-job)

I agree, but I was referring to Medium's business model (because of the OP's comment) - get people to write your content for free, and then make money off it. It's frustrating that they block distribution of your content to increase their own revenues. It's a completely different use case to BBC, the Guardian, NYT, etc, who pay people good salaries to write their stories.

Then people who are concerned about that shouldn't use Medium. It's not as if there aren't a million other free blogging platforms out there.

Well, when are the publishers' demands reasonable? A lot of online media is less about adding value, and more about doing whatever it takes to get your attention.

Not to mention opinion writers or critics: They already have the privilege of pushing their opinions on a large audience. Why should we pay them? For their eloquence? Sure it's a lot of work, being persuasive in writing, but is it the audience who should pay for being persuaded?

I think that the collective action problem of paying for the stuff we want can be solved, will be solved - even is solved, in increasingly many ways. But there's a lot of things we're used to that we don't really want, in proportion to what we used to pay for it.

Well, someone needs to pay for hosting, the performance improvements, and security audits and patches. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch...

That's the thing, right? Most of us have plenty of bandwidth and storage space and everything we need to host a site sitting in our living room. It's still too complicated for most people, though. It should already be as easy as Facebook...

Then just host it yourself. But Medium has to make a profit.

Then people who get paid full-time will produce content better than yours and we will read them instead of you.

Then why are you reading that free comment and not a comment you're paying for?

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