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by smooke 2655 days ago
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

1 comments

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.

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