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Comment by jakozaur | Hacker News Reader

Well by my (and Wikipedia[1]) definition Medium is not a "content farm".

Try reading this article replacing Medium with posterous/tumblr/subvtle/Google +/Wordpress... The content publishing is a commodity, nothing revolutionary or wrong with it.

[1] (from Wikipedia) "In the context of the World Wide Web, a content farm (or content mill) is a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views[1] as first exposed in the context of social spam.[2]"

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Most of those platforms don't demand to own the content you post on them, that's an important distinction.

See "Ownership and Licensing of Intellectual Property" here: https://medium.com/policy/9db0094a1e0f

"You retain ownership of all intellectual property rights in your User Content. Medium (and/or other third parties) retains ownership of intellectual property rights in all Content other than User Content."

It doesn't matter if you retain ownership if you also give them a "broad license" to re-use the content. Ownership gets you little more than a little bit of control over your name in parts of Europe.

> Try reading this article replacing Medium with posterous/tumblr/subvtle/Google +/Wordpress.

I've never played with Posterous, but Tumblr, Svbtle, and WordPress all allow you to use your own domain, which at least allows you to take your URLs with you if you leave.

Try reading this article replacing Medium with posterous/tumblr/subvtle/Google +/Wordpress

Yes, and? The point remains the same and remains valid, it just applies to more than just medium: if you don't host it yourself, it might disappear tomorrow, no natural catastrophe necessary, simply because it's the choice of people other than you.

The content publishing is a commodity, nothing revolutionary or wrong with it.

For me there is nothing right with it. We're not talking about the expensive and heavy printing presses of old; everybody should have at least one of them new-fangled ones, of not a dozen, just because hey why not.

I think there's a meaningful difference between publishing and re-publishing.

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