Why I Don't Write For Medium | Hacker News Reader

Why I Don't Write For Medium

medium.com

93 pointsjosephwegner61 comments

> There isn’t even a way for me to put a link to my twitter or my personal website so that I can drive that traffic somewhere useful.

> Joe Wegner Career Nerd. Was an IT guy. Is a software engineer (@CultivateStudios). Loves Christ. Married to @Erica_Wegner. http://t.co/yEBP9xbDiu

Am I missing something?

Yes - that byline is on an eminently unreadable light-grey-on-white and is easily skipped - it had to be pointed out to me that a friend had actually written an article I'd read!

Do authors get any branding past that byline? Maybe on the main page, but not on the article itself, not that I've seen. Thanks to link aggregators/HN, I've only hit articles directly and not the actual Medium.com home page.

Nor, unless everything a writer writes is on Medium, is there any continuity - where's the Medium.com link to any of Wegner's other writings?

Good for Medium, not great for a writer.

Medium is all about Medium, which is Wegner's valid point.

If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out of the building. Only Evan Williams can do 3 startups in a row, two of which are blog engines and one of which is... well, again a blog engine (albeit with 140 char limit). Granted he never seems to have any brilliant original ideas, but the dude knows how to spread his stuff like wildfire and pile up yet another billion dollar in the process. Almost overnight, posts on Medium has been appearing on HN like TechCrunch and other well known outlets who have put years on building reputation. To me, most posts doesn't seem to have that much of a substance but headlines are eye catching and they do get lots of upvotes (hopefully, not from faking). Seriously, how does he do it?

My suspicion that posts from Mediam are being upvoted by buch of their stackholders may not be entirely false. Looks like any anti-medium comments gets promptly downvoted without explanation.

If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out of the building.

You really believe this? Blogs are a huge market, I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly.

Medium isn't just a blogging engine, per se. As the author of this article points out, it's also a content farm. The genius of Medium is that it (theoretically) encourages people to post thoughtful, good content -- and the collective efforts of everyone doing this create a high-quality content farm at scale. This is different from the typical take on content-farming, i.e., paying a bunch of people peanuts to crank out endless iterations on aggregated Miley Cyrus headlines.

Now, one could certainly make the argument that Medium's game is a little shady. To paraphrase The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick Medium ever played was convincing the world it wasn't a content farm."

One could argue, furthermore, that most of the content on Medium isn't all that good. But I think the jury's still out on that charge. I've seen some good stuff on Medium, and I've seen some crap. But it doesn't seem, on average, markedly better or worse than what I'd expect to see on a random walk through any other blogging platform.

Let's play a game:

--- False Medium or Real Medium !?! ---

1) "Yes, Vagina, There Is No Such Thing as Normal"

2) "I Tattooed My Friend’s Name On My Head…And Then We Broke Up"

3) "Living With a Cracked iPhone Screen"

4) "Changing Condom Culture"

5) "A Night at the Laundromat"

6) "In which the NSA and I freak each other out on LinkedIn"

Some of these are really from Medium, some are from the parody FalseMedium [1]. Can you guess which ones are fake?! (Answers [2])

[1] https://twitter.com/FalseMedium

[2] http://pastebin.com/Kh7B1b9C

Medium makes me laugh the same way showing up at an open-mic night full of amateur "poets" at the coffee shop makes me laugh.

You mean the "laughing for 5 seconds and then burying your head in your hands" way?

Probably more like laughing for 5 seconds, then standing there awkwardly for another 120 seconds, then getting your coffee and getting the hell out of there as quickly as possible way.

My guess was pretty much the complete opposite. That's rather uncomforting.

Github's indemnity clause is at least as scary as Medium's licensing clause.

Any company that relies on user generated content needs users to agree to what Medium's legalese says. At least it's explicit. Assuming you own the copyright to content you put on Medium, how else can they publish it? Github's language is informal, and not written in terms of copyright, but is functionally the same ... though the full term isn't included in the parent:

> We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

Allowing people to view my content is much different from giving a company the rights to redistribute it. Github's terms may be less formal, but they say very different things.

Serving your content up to readers is redistributing it. You are implicitly granting Github that right by agreeing to let them serve your content to other users.

Note that Github isn't in the user generated content business, primarily, so they are less at risk by leaving the terms loose and human. I would generally prefer Medium's terms, but written / translated into non-legalese. Some company did this a few years ago, I wish I could find it.

"Allowing people to view my content" is redistribution. There's a copy at Medium and there's a copy on the reader's computer.

I don't get it.

Medium's policy is more or less to get a non exclusive license and copyright on your content, and they can transfer these to any entity they want.

Github's policy is to not interfer with property or copyright and allow anyone to view/copy/fork your content, which in itself shouldn't transfer any rights.

The two seem very different and Github is basicaly saying that you'll have to sort out the licensing and other legal issues by yourself. So you have to do the work (setting a license and ownership, eventualy copyright) but how is it scary ?

This person is very confused about copyright and the difference between an exclusive and non-exclusive right to redistribute.

This person is also very confused about the nature of ownership in general.

I'd love for you to expand on this. Truthfully I am not an expert on copyright law, but I do find many ToS to be fairly self explanatory.

I'd be happy to update the post if I was misleading somewhere.

Medium needs a license to your content to publish it. That clause grants them that license. Non-exclusive means they're not asking you for ownership, they're just asking for a license that allows them to distribute the content.

If they wanted ownership, they'd do something like Craigslist:

> You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post).

"they're just asking for a license that allows them to distribute the content"

The license is much broader than this:

"By furnishing your User Content to Medium, you give Medium a non-exclusive worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to utilize all copyright rights now in existence or that may arise in the future with respect to your User Content, in any medium that now exists or may arise in the future, as well as to do anything else that is reasonably appropriate to our Service and its use of your User Content (including, but not limited to, use of your name in association with your User Content to identify you as the contributor). The license has no restriction as to the medium, dissemination method, type of Service we may offer, or the type of systems or products that may be used in conjunction with your User Content."

You can revoke the license by removing your content, which is a silver lining.

Most of this is just defining the scope of distribution.

Sublicensable is, perhaps, scary -- but it let's them legally allow other entities to distribute the content. This seems necessary for, say, RSS feeds if they want to let others use the content in aggregators.

The mediums (lower case m) all make sense, a "best of Medium" coffee table book is still distribution, and likely reasonable? I am actually curious what their general user expectations are for this type of thing. Note that this is clarifying language, though, the right to distribute doesn't imply a specific medium ... so they would be getting the same thing even without being explicit.

"Utilize all copyright rights" does include creation of derivative works, which would be an interesting thing for Medium to try and do (and probably go counter to what users would expect). I think that's the only one of the copyright rights that's "weird" for these terms.

The "anything else that is reasonably appropriate" clause let's them do stuff that's not normally in the scope of copyright. Reasonable is a legally restrictive word and would actually give power to what their user base generally finds fair. It really seems more like cover-your-butt language than a significantly larger scope.

That CL language is only slightly more aggressive in terms of ownership than the Medium terms. All CL did there was add the ability to enforce against competitors scraping CL pages and reposting the content on their own sites to bootstrap content, a problem CL has been plagued with from many would-be usurpers and parasites. The author of the ad still retains general ownership of the content. You can legally post something to CL and then post the exact same text to eBay or wherever else, CL is not taking that right from you under those terms. As long as you are the one doing the reposting (not a parasitic third party scraper).

Language that takes full ownership would be the kind of thing you'd see in a work-for-hire writing contract, which looks something like this:

> The copyright for all Work produced under this agreement shall belong to the Client at all times. Client shall exclusively own in perpetuity all now known or hereafter existing rights of every nature worldwide pertaining to such Work in or as part of any version of the Client’s publications that are published in print or displayed through computer-assisted and other interactive media such as the Internet and World Wide Web (collectively the "Rights").

Step 1: You upload content to some site, with the intent they'll display it to other people.

Step 2: They display it to other people.

Step 3: If they didn't have a clause like this, you sue for copyright infringement.

Basically, in order to do anything useful at all -- even to store the content, assuming a distributed store that makes multiple copies -- they need an actual, honest-to-god copyright license from you, the creator of the content. "But we figured he wanted us to because he uploaded it" is not a license and will not hold up in court.

Granting a license does not transfer ownership; it is simply a set of permissions. People who really and truly ought to know better continue to post scary and idiotic posts claiming that it's a change of ownership though. You shouldn't listen to those people.

+1 in general except I think you are defining "ownership" a bit too narrowly here. For some authoritative discussion on the nature of "ownership" in copyright, see http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html

Quite right. That license doesn't give Medium ownership of the content. It just grants them a broad license. The author remains the owner and since it's a non-exclusive license he's free to republish it under any terms he likes elsewhere.

Most of that is pretty standard. However, this part seems overly broad:

   license to utilize all copyright rights now in
   existence or that may arise in the future
   with respect to your User Content

So if someone published an article on Medium speculating on what would happen if a United State Marine expeditionary unit was unexpectedly transported back to Rome in the time of Augustus Caesar [1], Medium could write a screenplay and shop it around Hollywood, and if it sold they wouldn't even have to pay the author anything?

In the United States, the copyright owner of a copyrighted work has these exclusive rights [2]:

1. to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies.

2. to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted works.

3. to distribute copies of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.

4. to perform the copyrighted work publicly.

5. to display the copyrighted work publicly.

I can see Medium needing a royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable license to do #1, #3, and maybe #5.

I don't see a need for them to have any #4 rights. For example, if someone publishes a play on Medium I don't see why Medium would need the right to perform that play publicly.

I don't see any need for them to have #2 rights. I can see that they might want to do things like publish collections of the best of Medium, but doing that would require exercising the copying right (#1) and the distribution right (#3), not the derivative work right (#2). When you include a copy of a work in a larger work, such as an anthology, you are not making a derivative work--you are making a collective work [3]:

   A “collective work” is a work, such as a periodical
   issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number
   of contributions, constituting separate and independent
   works in themselves, are assembled into a collective
   whole.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome

[2] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

[3] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101

Okay, but Reddit could do that to the Rome Sweet Rome thing, too. Their TOS has the same set of rights granted, spelled out even more explicitly:

>>> Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy, you agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.[1]

I guess that what I'm saying here is that this clause is not in the least bit uncommon.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/useragreement

EDIT: In fact, I noticed after posting this that the Rome Sweet Rome wikipedia article has a section about "Licensing Issues", talking about reddit's TOS. (Plus general content contributed by other users.)

An article linked to Medium, about Medium, to get people to talk about Medium, on Medium, which you are not allowed to write for, and keeps ownership of everything created by those who are allowed to write for. I can see the appeal.

right to use is not ownership. Ownership is a misplaced metaphor for things like articles.

There is irony in multiple dimensions here. By publishing an article critical of itself but whose core argument actually has very small teeth, Medium gets to appear magnanamous and balanced and thus receives a net benefit in reputation. And likewise on the author's side, with one hand the he condemns that writing for Medium benefits Medium more than it benefits him, but with the other hand he reaps the clear benefit of the notoriety gained from publishing it on Medium. It's all a very clever scarf trick.

At first, i thought "Hey, what an idiot - why does this take me to medium then?".

But then i actually read it and i agree - everyone should read the ToS of a service they use, but sadly most people don't.

And therefore are mostly surprised when i tell them that $service owns every word, photo and whatnot they publish on it.

What really bugs me is that most people you tell are really indifferent to this. They plainly don't care that they gave up every right on, say, a photo they made to a megacorp - this should change.

You don't give up every right or even any right. You retain all your rights. But you have to give medium (or google or whomever) a license to redistribute what you wrote, otherwise they cannot do so and it's pointless to have written it using that service.

But why do we have to give them that right to redistribute? Using github, or even better your own server, the service doesn't gain any right to redistribute my content.

Because Medium is, by definition, redistributing your content every time someone loads up the article. They just distributed the parent article to me. If they sold the company, the acquirer also needs to distribute the content (transferable).

Github's terms grant them the same ability, just not as explicitly.

Because Medium just redistributed your post to us. If you use your own server then you're the one that's doing the redistributing.

If they didn't have the right to redistribute, you could sue them for letting us read your essay complaining about them asking for the right to redistribute.

I don't understand why in the quote from Medium's terms of service he chose to bold "non-exclusive".

That bolding is from Medium's terms. I did not add the formatting.

These articles kind of miss the appeal of something like medium. If you have a blog and/or an audience, you probably don't want to use medium very often; but if you have something to write that you think might appeal to a broader audience medium might get you more publicity.

I mean, if you have your own blog, why write an op ed for the New York Times? Why write a comment on HN? Why do a TV interview? Why write or speak anywhere but your own website? Because many of those [ah, fuck, how do I choose another word than] media can reach a bigger or different audience than your website, spreading your ideas, increasing your reputation, etc.

The other nontrivial factor for medium specifically is for people who want to write something every few months or so. They're unlikely to build an audience for their own blog, but if they write on medium they might get read.

He's got a real point here. Medium helps you drive traffic to... Medium. From a personal branding POV, you're probably better off with even a free Wordpress site. (Though, really, if you want to control your online presence, you should definitely host your own blog. It's not hard or expensive.)

The uniform look of Medium sites also pushes value in their direction instead of yours. When I view an article on Medium, I always look at the same-as-every-other-page-on-Medium design and think "oh, this is Medium" rather than "oh, this is <insert author's name here>."

I wish all these posts didn't look the same. Honestly the same exact layout on every single one is so boring now that I just figure the articles are just as boring, which they usually are. Its like reading the wannabe New Yorker without any cartoons. /rant

What's so good about the Medium editor?

I want to build a SAAS based licensing sub module for existing blogging platforms (does not matter it is wordpress, blogger, or your own website) as long as your integrate with the licensing SAAS platform, you can license your content. Anybody interested in something like that? Idea and discuss about welcome.

This is the exact reason why I built Silvrback. If you haven't seen it yet (was on HN a couple weeks ago), here it is: https://www.silvrback.com/dsowers/introducing-silvrback

Shipping soon.

I loved the idea, but like Logdown (posted on here today), they're hosted. I'd really love something like an amalgam of both services but self-hosted.

This can help the numerous of people that asked your help for a static website

http://blog.wercker.com/2013/07/25/Using-wercker-to-publish-...

They need a license to display the content, and if they ever want to sell the site they need to be able to transfer it. Seems reasonable to me. They made it non-exclusive so you can still own it, and even publish it elsewhere if I'm reading it right.

I had no idea that medium owned the content. When it started, I read on HN that medium was a platform like wordpress.com but now it is clear that that is not true at all.

What are people on medium thinking then? or do they simply not know better?

Wasn't this exact same post posted here a couple of weeks ago?

Nope - I just wrote this this evening. Perhaps someone else had similar ideas.

Is it telling that I've not been able to find any narrative writing on your github pages, but I found your medium article just fine?

Perhaps non-exclusive rights to your work, in exchange for discoverability, is fair trade.

And perhaps I need to learn more about github pages.

You likely can't find any narrative writing because I don't publicize it. It's at stories.wegnerdesign.com . However, the same principles apply to my tech blog. I spend a lot of time on those posts, and I don't want anyone else to have rights to it.

As far as the worth of exclusive rights, I suppose it is personal opinion, but I still disagree. Especially when exclusive rights are so easy to come by.

Is it possible you're misunderstanding exclusive / non-exclusive rights? Non-exclusive is better for you. Terms that required exclusive rights would restrict you from "licensing" your content to someone else, or even publishing it on your own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right

I apologize - wrote that from my phone at 1AM - I did mean to say non-exclusive rights :)

https://medium.com/writers-on-writing/336300490cbb

There's also http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left-medium/

Not on Medium but relevant to this discussion.

That's either hilarious (or depressing) that people can't even tell the content of your posts apart (probably because its all so generic.)

There was basically the same article on medium a few weeks ago titled something like "A shiny content farm is still a content farm". I have to agree... not really new.

The service Medium provides is that people will actually read what you write. If you've already built an audience, then it's probably not for you.

So, how is Silvrback development coming along, I wonder?

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