Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall | Hacker News Reader

Medium pressured freeCodeCamp to put the articles behind the firewall

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210 pointsplanetjones66 comments

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20190531170114/https://twitter.c...

Stop using Medium. Seriously, what will it take to get people off this terrible platform? It's bad for readers, bad for content creators, and doesn't even have the audience people claim to be benefiting from anymore.

If you just want dead simple publishing (which was what Medium was supposed to be originally before it became terrible), try https://write.as/ (I have no affiliation with it, but I really like it)

If that goes dead, here are the 2 screenshots of it:

- The tweet: https://bluetide.pro/EOVchT

- The img in the tweet: https://bluetide.pro/X6qAyN

Full tweet and screenshot text below:

--------------------------------------

@oleg008:

"Wow, @Medium pressured @freeCodeCamp to put articles behind the firewall:

'They have pressured us to put our articles behind their paywalls. We refused. So they tried to buy us... We refused. Then they started threatening us with a lawyer.'

Can't believe this is real."

[SCREENSHOT TEXT]

Hi Oleg,

Thanks again for publishing on freeCodeCamp's Medium publication.

freeCodeCamp is the biggest publication on Medium. Our open source community sends Medium about 5% of their total traffic.

But over the past year, Medium has become more aggressive toward us. They have pressured us to put our articles behind their paywalls. We refused. So they tried to buy us. (Which makes no sense. We're a public charity.) We refused. Then they started threatening us with a lawyer.

It's not just us. They are doing this to a lot of publications. And a lot of high profile people from the developer community are leaving Medium as a result.

Medium is a corporation founded by a billionaire who also accepted $132 million in venture capital.

freeCodeCamp is just a tiny donor-supported nonprofit.

I tell you this not because I want you to be angry. I'm not angry. I just want to help people learn to code.

So together, the community made plans to leave Medium. We built freeCodeCamp News as fast as we could.

freeCodeCamp News is a place where you can share your blog articles. It's free, it doesn't have ads, and it's open source. There are no "sign in" popups or paywalled articles. According to Google's own Lighthouse Score, freeCodeCamp News is faster than Medium, has better SEO than Medium, and is more accessible than Medium.

And in just the past 48 hours, hundreds of thousands of people have read articles on freeCodeCamp News. So we have a growing audience for your articles.

This said, all of your articles are still on Medium where they were before.

The articles you submitted - which we edited then published in freeCodeCamp's Medium publication - are now on freeCodeCamp News, too.

You can read more about freeCodeCamp News - including my detailed FAQ - here: https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/279929

On a personal note, I wrote more than 500 articles on Medium. I built up a following of 155,000 people on Medium over the years. It was hard to leave Medium. But I have no doubt that it was the right thing to do.

I'm optimistic that all of us in the developer community can start our own blogs on the open web, then use community tools like freeCodeCamp News to raise awareness of them.

I'm looking forward to reading more of your writing in the future.

Best,

Quincy Larson The teacher who founded freeCodeCamp.org

[/SCREENSHOT TEXT]

Their https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ is indeed even better. Loads images without JS!

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/

Definitely an intentional strategy on Medium's part. Guess they think the increase in revenue will outweigh the decline in the number of new articles and readership. They might be right, but the experience for both publishers and readers is much shittier as a result now.

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.

Hackernoon was also on the sketchier side, injecting ads and huge subscribe/tweet/etc buttons on 3rd party posts. Published once there, never ever gonna use a Medium publication again.

It seems like the other top post for today ("Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes" [1] [2]) comes at a perfect time now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20060549

[2] https://github.com/mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog

Yes, and most comments were questioning the _why_ completely oblivious to what Medium has become lately.

Or even git(lab/hub)? if too lazy to set up your own.

Yeah, that solution does actually automatically put it out on github. I wish it wasn't locked to another vendor, but it's a good options.

From the thread, the email author says:

> This email was intended only for Oleg and a few of our other authors. I have messaged him asking to delete it. We are focused on the future and want to move on from this.

Is that because they really want to move on or is it because the email doesn't tell the whole story?

Curious to hear Medium's response.

As I understood it, the request was from the founder of FCC who presumably doesn't want the drama.

I get his concern, but as someone uninvolved in FCC but who does read Medium I'm glad to see this sort of thing out in the open.

I get his concern as well, but at the same time... why would ANYONE share something you might regret (like on this case) if the content is made public?

For sensitive communications within a organization, generally it's implied that the contents are secret and shouldn't be disclosed.

In this case, the communications aren't sensitive (not even a "keep this on the down low" caveat), and the recipients of the email generally aren't in the organization (it was sent to "a few of our other authors", using the royal "our").

you've never told someone something in confidence?

Yes, because telling someone something in confidence is the same as sending a fucking email. You are reaaaaaaaally making an effort to look obtuse.

It's probably because they're afraid of even more frivolous lawsuits coming from Medium.

Still worth to have it exposed...

Medium is done as a platform. If you still post content there you need to look for an alternative. It will not get any better. The management shows zero will to recognize the issues and to solve it. As soon as a company resorts to dark UI patterns (which medium has done for some time now) it is always downhill from there. Just in the last few weeks I have found 5+ regular authors that does NOT intend to post premium articles but have been tricked into doing so through a misleading/dark UI. Kind of a shame since it used to be quite good as discovery platform and it had promise but it is not anymore and I spend zero time on the platform apart from reading articles that I click from my Twitter feed.

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.

... It might be a bit late for that.

Yeah, it's already in the archive sites anyway

http://archive.is/3C1tK

Never send an email you wouldn't want forwarded. We all learn this lesson, eventually.

The cat's out of the bag. I think you'll need to try a different approach.

Are you Quincy Larson?

I believe he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15918172

Genuinely curious though, why try to sweep under the rug the sketchy tactics Medium tried to pull here? I think this should be a good warning for others. You can move on, and focus on the future but still reflect and share the past. They are not exclusive, in my opinion.

my best guess (albeit, guess -- don't know much about medium or freeCodeCamp) would be fear of further frivolous threats and potential legal actions on behalf of medium. Frivolous lawsuits, no matter how ridiculous (libel, whatever) can feel a lot less frivolous to small/non-profit organizations who don't have the capital to point this out in court or respond when companies beat them over the head with their greater resource pools and influence. Also, it seems likely if they were bringing that much traffic to medium, they probably do have good relationships with some individuals at medium and probably don't want to alienate those connections based on a couple poor decisions, which is totally understandable.

I can't find the person who originally said it, but: Dance like no one's watching, email like it might be read aloud at a deposition.

> We just want to move on and focus on the future.

Please understand, that it's not an issue with freeCodeCamp. It's an issue with Medium. And it would be a disservice to the entire community to remain silent. There must be thousands of people who are now on Medium because freeCodeCamp had chosen it as its platform, and they deserve to know what happened.

> It was not intended to be shared on Twitter.

That's not how the internet works.

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).

Hopefully someday we'll start recognizing the pattern. Sites built on large amounts of venture capital are literally too good to be true.

They're able to lose tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year providing completely unsustainable services, but they can't keep doing it forever. When they start monetizing, they have to use methods that are far more aggressive than would have been needed originally, because they're starting at the bottom of a giant hole they dug themselves into.

Yes, a store that sells dollar bills for 90 cents would be very popular. The tech industry needs to stop acting like there's anything impressive about that.

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?

He is. And he is currently running the tildes.net non-profit, so I guess that says a bit ;)

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.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)

The site's been public to view (but still needs an invite to register) for a few months now, so anyone can have a look: https://tildes.net

Feel free to email me for an invite if anyone's interested, the address is in the blog post. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth under control while we keep building up a base site culture and features.

> 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.

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.

Ha, I’m working on this. It’s called Aether: http://getaether.net. You contribute bandwidth / cpu / storage by being a peer on the network. It’s less Medium and more Slashdot / Reddit though.

If you're looking for a replacement to reddit - there's https://saidit.net/ - it's still fairly new, and if you sign up (well, happened to me - maybe it's changed since a few weeks ago?) they subscribe you to all of the subs (so you have to manually unsub from those you don't want to be in - and yes, several of the "ugly" subs from reddit migrated there after the last "great purge").

I don't know how sustainable it will be or can be, if it will stay ok or devolve into a weird "4chan-like" mess, or go the same way as reddit (if it gets popular, gets money, or what). I'm not even sure who's really behind it (that probably isn't a good thing).

But - it's one option that I know of (and if you find out more about it or others, let me know if you can or want to).

"They tried to buy us but we are a public charity"

Made my day, thanks.

"You have no powere here"

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).

Fair point about what the effect might be. I'm talking about the ethics of the YCombinator community and company in particular and not the internets at large. If someone asks me to delete something that was private, I just do it.

If it's posted publicly, it's public. They can't really do anything about that.

> 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.

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 comes to explaining a concept, most sites on the internet just cover the basics and promise they'll get to the deeper stuff later (and never do.)

The nice thing about the old book model (Before ebooks), is the amount of work it took to get a book published ended up filtering out all the mediocre content which we see today on the internet because it is so easy to hit publish somewhere. Paying for a book is worth it, as the book is actually a complete thought. The stuff people are trying to charge for on the internet is just mostly low quality stream of conscious writings with no actual content behind it.

The nail has been hit on the head. I have more things I'd like to read than I do free time to read them. If I run into a paywall I'll bounce to something else, or go search for the same topic somewhere else.

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.

> Facebook hasn't figured this out with in-video ads.

You haven't figured it out you means. My SO watches theses ads, so does many others peoples.

At the end of the day, they still have to provide you this service, they aren't a charity. You either get theses ads, or you don't get that content... whether you believe that content is worth it or not, doesn't change its cost.

>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.

Why can't Medium follow YouTube's business model?

Provide ad-supported content with premium ad-free option.

There are two kind of authors at Medium. There are those who try to earn money directly from their writing and those who just want to write and maybe monetize in other ways, maybe not monetize at all just make their writing a gift to the humanity. The second kind of authors hate the paywall.

What is worse is that there is a negative selection among those who want to earn from their writing - those who really know writing try to get into real journalism and the Medium authors are mostly those who try to earn money. That is not to say that there are no good writers, just last week I have eventually paid the Medium membership only because one author, but I am disappointed about the whole package. I presume there is better stuff written by the fist type of authors who write because they want to say something - but they are not recommended by Medium because they don't want the paywall. So being recommended is mostly a negative sign - it is often even written quite well - but with no depth.

I really wish Medium all the best - because the traditional media are failing and we as society, we have to find a way to support journalists. But the Medium experiment is probably failed one.

Unrelated to this thread, but I can't remember when reading any good words about Medium last time :)

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.

Got no skin in the game, but why all this hate for medium? Sounds like they just don't want to do ads?

If you can't read the article, can you at least read the headline?

I am curious what “pressured” means. A threat? A shakedown? Or a polite email? The headline doesn’t really make it clear and the “article” is deleted.

The HN discussion contains links to archived versions at the very top.

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