[browniefed]

HackerNoon is a bit of a scam. They started by requesting hundreds of people post on their publication through a Medium feature that has since been removed.

They would take sponsorships, and have made some significant cash built on the back of people publishing their content on HackerNoon for mediocre exposure.

HackerNoon broke a lot of stuff laid out in the TOS. There is a big battle going on with the whole Medium + Publication sphere which I have some inside knowledge of.

Overall Medium is a whatever platform, and HackerNoon just is just making money off other peoples content.

[tonystubblebine]

IMO, Hacker Noon's scam went completely over the top when they tried to raise investment money from their readers. A huge headline in their prospectus was getting 8M page views per month. But there was no discussion of this obvious risk, which is that they don't own the copy right to most of their work. So the new site is going to be getting much less than 8M views.

[smooke]

Hey Tony from Medium, David from Hacker Noon here. We are proudly funded by 1.2k readers, what's wrong with that? Instead of raising money from VCs, we want to be accountable to the people who actually value Hacker Noon. Obviously you don't and won't.

[tonystubblebine]

IMO, you've opened yourself up to lawsuits from all of your investors by hiding material information about your risks. If you launch a new site with fewer than 8M page views, your investors should ask why. And if the answer is that you weren't able to port your back catalog to your new site because you don't have rights to those articles, your investors should ask if you knew this ahead of time. And if you did, they should consider suing you.

I know this "Tony from Medium" is your attempt to say that I'm speaking for Medium. I'm not. I have a bag of potential biases here including a small amount of Medium stock, shared investors with Medium, Medium's CEO was my boss in 2005, my cofounder and one of my former employees both now work at Medium, etc. But my main bias is posted elsewhere in these threads. I own and operate Better Humans and have a publishing partnership with Medium. I labeled that somewhere else as Medium dumping a pile of money on us. If I was speaking as a representative of Medium, I'd say that. I'm speaking as myself and as someone who has a lot of publishing experience.

Plus, none of those potential biases have anything to do with the facts of your prospectus. If you raised that money dishonestly, you're taking on a lot of risk to yourself for no good reason.

[smooke]

Hey Tony for the equity crowdfunding campaign we were vetted by 3rd party accountants and 3rd party lawyers. We published hundreds of pages of information will full financials and risks. You can find it here: https://www.startengine.com/hackernoon

Interesting that you think I raise money dishonestly, while Equity Crowdfunding is the only form of funding that publicly discloses all kinds of information for EVERYONE, not just the wealthy. For private raise, these kinds of info would typically be, well, private.

A short overview of the misinformation here:

$ I've been very upfront with my investors about what Medium is saying to me. Just a month ago Medium wrote that they wanted to cooperate on archiving past hacker noon on a hacker noon subdomain. Would you like me to forward you the email? But I've come to learn that when working with Medium, its best to hedge your bets. Well over half of our library have already explicitly opt-ed into Medium free terms with us. And I think its the better half. We also have been recruiting great content that we haven't published yet. Either way, our long term success will not be determined by content from the past; it'll be about how good or bad of a site we have going forward. And as Ev says "publishers and writers are free to move from Medium at any time" so there shouldn't be any problem here, but there is: https://twitter.com/DavidSmooke/status/1105522935349952512

$ Pageviews is not our metric. We don't need 8M pageviews to make far more $$$ than we are making now b/c Medium blocked our ability to run sponsors on our site (while running their own pop up ads). And we can open up new revenue streams. already this year we have podcast and events revenue.

Anyways, you think you're right and are willing to spend your time shouting about it. In a different time, I think we would have really liked building media together. You've made some cool things and have worked with some remarkable ppl - but I am just going to see you as another guy writing for his own vested interest. All the best. - David

[mercer]

I gotta say this entire HN thread leaves me with a negative impression of both 'David from Hacker Noon' and 'Tony from Medium'. More the latter than the former, but honestly I can't tell.

Mostly I'm left thinking the 'drama' in here is entirely befitting the general quality of both properties. I generally find Medium and Hacker Noon links to be somewhat underwhelming whenever they're posted to this here HN.

[smooke]

Thanks for the honesty Mercer, looking forward to moving past this and just focusing on making my site better.