Medium's republishing API has already become a problem for original sources on HN.
p.s. Comments in the threads are an unreliable way to reach us. There are too many for us to see them all. The reliable way is to email hn@ycombinator.com.
To hijack your tongue-in-cheek comment...I genuinely would appreciate it if someone, at some point, looked at analytics before and after syndicating to Medium to not just compare number of visitors between the original blog and Medium, but whether PageRank for the original blog dropped due to duplication penalties applied by Google's algorithm.
I want to take them at their word...but it's more up to Google, isn't it? And doesn't Google still rely (in part) on the canonical meta tag to resolve duplicates? Currently, the posted Medium post has this:
It would be relatively easy for Medium to appropriately set that tag -- I mean, if "original URL" is captured somewhere in the API, or in the Medium post-create-admin interface (I don't know, I haven't logged into my own Medium for awhile)...that would explicitly resolve the ambiguity, though at an obvious cost to their own SEO.
Medium's republishing API has already become a problem for original sources on HN.
p.s. Comments in the threads are an unreliable way to reach us. There are too many for us to see them all. The reliable way is to email hn@ycombinator.com.