Comment by smooke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smooke | Hacker News Reader

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

> 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.

> 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.

I was under the impression that there were two types of pubs on Medium: One like HackerNoon which only aggregates/reposts content, and another which was subsidized by Medium to produce original, quality content. (the lack of success of the latter causing a business model pivot, which also breaks the former)

Latter being subsidized? I think the confusion is just that Medium pivoted so many times.

So they subsidized pubs like Matter and then walked away from that. That happened before they had a paywall.

And now they're paying pubs like Better Humans. It sort of feels like being subsidized because they're willing to pay up front based on what they think you'll grow to. But it's really ends up being a partnership where they are cutting you in on their revenue (the expectation is that both sides will make a profit).

They're just not very far along on understanding this partner pubs model.

But I think you'll be seeing a lot more of it. And part of making the switch is not having low quality publications stealing eyeballs from their higher quality pubs.

It's great to hear that Medium deemed some publications worth dumping money into - more funded media outlets is awesome! This isn't a zero sum game. But any publication with one paying customer is taking on TREMENDOUS risk. The reality is the community and not the wealthy should determine what media exists. Medium killed the ability for publications to have their readers pay to subscribe to them https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/medium-publication.php and killed the ability for publications to run sponsorship (while continuing to run pop up ads on content they didn't own). It was an interesting tradeoff but I am done with it.

For those without full context, this comment is by Hacker Noon's CEO ^^

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