Show HN: Dev community that lets you blog on your domain for free | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dev community that lets you blog on your domain for free

hashnode.com

11 pointsSandeepg33k12 comments

- /clicks on terms

- ctrl-f “arbitration”

- “Many matches found”

Thought so. Even hip and cool blog post platforms aren’t immune from the mandatory binding arbitration disease. Not even the courtesy of an opt-out for people who might know better.

I guess I should just expect this crap everywhere now. It’s legal to deny access to the courts and apparently everyone is scared to death of getting sued.

Please elaborate on this, I'd like to learn more about the implications of finding this word in the terms, speaking as a complete noob on the issue.

It is a section in the terms and conditions that says if you have a disagreement with the company over something in the contract and cannot resolve it with them informally, you may not sue. You may only take your dispute to a non-judge arbitrator, who is usually paid by the company you are arguing with and whose ruling you may not appeal. You also may not come together as a group with other people who are wronged and argue as a group; each of you must argue individually.

A series of articles with more information on why this is crap, especially for business-to-consumer take-it-or-leave-it contracts: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitra...

Wow, Arbitration is such a get-out-easy-card and characteristic shady corporate way of circumventing accountability. I normally don't thank people for sending me a down a rabbit hole, but here's an exception. Learnt something new today, thanks.

How is this any different from using a typical static site generator and posting links to your blog to your preferred social outlet? Local setup for a static site repo is trivial if you use an existing repo as a starting point.

Most static site gen templates include RSS feeds (removing the need for the "built-in newsletter") and are light enough to run circles around AMP pages. Given the easy setup, all that's left is deployment: a problem with a million simple solutions.

I notice this is targeted at developers. What does this offer for a developer capable of posting to HN, Reddit, the Fediverse, etc.; running `make` to generate their blog; and combining `git push` with their preferred deployment solution (rsync in CI/CD, Netlify, GitHub Pages)?

We already have the ability to blog in markdown on our own domain, with a copy of the content in a git repo. Am I missing anything?

Discovery by the sounds of it. To quote the other comment:

> We realized that traditional publishing platforms offer visibility and engagement at the cost of content ownership. On the other hand if you go with a self hosted solution, your articles don't get proper visibility and reach. Hashnode combines the best of both worlds

So this auto-posts our articles to its own link aggregator? How is that better than Hacker News, mainstream social media, Lobste.rs, the Fediverse, chatrooms, and webrings? Is the advantage that their aggregator exclusively contains content from their own platform, meaning that publishing in their walled garden is the only way to get that audience?

The aforementioned discovery outlets aren't locked into a single publishing platform. What's the point of making a discovery outlet that, like Medium and Dev.to, only allows blogs published on its own platform?

Hey HN,

I am Sandeep, co-founder of Hashnode. I am super excited to be here and share what we have been working on.

Hashnode helps developers start a personal blog on their own domain for free and find readership from an active dev community.

We realized that traditional publishing platforms offer visibility and engagement at the cost of content ownership. On the other hand if you go with a self hosted solution, your articles don't get proper visibility and reach. Hashnode combines the best of both worlds. It lets you map a custom domain and publish articles under your own branding and also distributes them to a built in developer community.

We launched in June this year and have been growing 30% in different KPIs month over month. So, it has been a crazy ride so far.

Seeing strong word of mouth and traction! We have curated some of the testimonials here: https://hashnode.com/testimonials

I would love to know what you think!

> On the other hand if you go with a self hosted solution, your articles don't get proper visibility and reach

I'm curious what you mean by this

What experience level of developer are you targeting as both writer and audience?

What will be the revenue strategy?

Good concept and execution. Great alternative to dev.to and medium.

Dev.to is nice (though at times sluggish on mobile) but please don't write tech articles on medium.

if its free, your the product

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