Why did Hacker Noon transition off Medium?

Short answer: We are no longer a viable business under the Medium paywall model, and ultimately, to take the next step as a media company we needed to own our software.

Long, detailed answer: this podcast episode with CEO David Smooke. You can also read the transcript here.

First off, it's not an either or. Writers should own their content and distribute it to many places. If you want to use a paywall to monetize your story, medium.com and coil.com are great options. If you want to remove barriers to reading (like paywalls, pop up ads, etc.), Hacker Noon is a great place to publish. In addition to editorial review and quality distribution, we also offer contributing writers a customizable, prominently placed profile Call To Action (a nice new Hacker Noon 2.0 feature) that can be used to drive traffic to your preferred place on the internet, such as newsletter subscribers, job ads, social media campaigns, a company/organization you believe in, your personal website, or anything else.

They will remain available at their current location: HackerNoon.com/Story-Title with our new back end software, and be moved from HackerNoon.com/Story-Title to Medium.com/HackerNoon/Story-title so that they retain the Medium links, claps, stats, profile association, etc..

Any story can be removed from Medium.com (how to) or HackerNoon.com (how to) by the contributing writer.

They will continue to work! Unless you opt out of our Terms of Service, your Hacker Noon stories’ URLs will direct to the same URLs they have for their entire time they lived on HackerNoon.com/Story-Title, as we don’t want to break any link around the Internet. These stories will be connected to a new author profile that you can claim.

We have finished attributing most of 1.0 stories to their rightful writers. However, if you still need help, please contact us.

Anyone can create a free account by visiting hackernoon.com/signup. Readers do not have to create Hacker Noon accounts 😃 But if they do, they get access to some dope functionality. Writers do have to create accounts in order to start writing and get published.

Yes. Please contact us and choose I want to merge my multiple accounts into one

Sorry about that! There could be a number of reasons: a mismatch between your current Medium handle & the one we have in our system, a story/account that was temporarily suspended by Medium, or that you have opted out of our Terms of Service!

In these cases, please contact us we will be able to help you out.