I'm concerned with the move that FreeCodeCamp just pulled by leaving Medium

Hey Ben, did this ever get resolved, or is it still in "weird" territory?

Hi Ben, see you mentioned Hacker Noon in this story about FreeCodeCamp changing their techstack, so I wanted to jump in :-) I’m the Founder/CEO of Hacker Noon and this is my first Dev.to post! Overall, no migration will be perfect, but I think Quincy made a tough decision that will benefit FCC's users. A few things ---

• From the beginning, users have opted users into publishing on hackernoon.com. This gives us an explicit, non-exclusive license to republish the stories. We’ve been open about this, in posts and buttons on the Hacker Noon homepage and in our terms. Writers own the content (it's not 'their medium content,' it is simply 'their content') and should publish on many sites (Hacker Noon, Dev.to, Medium, and FreeCodeCamp - for example).

• I think a number of your screenshots are misleading because FreeCodeCamp did type in “By Author Name” for every article, and I'd bet as they work out the transition bugs, they’ll get author thumbnails and links up there too. It’s important to remember that as FCC ran their Medium publication as a subdomain for their own site, their first obligation is to the contributing writer, ensuring all their past links work in a time of techstack transition. They executed this, and I hope we will too.

• At Hacker Noon, we always give authors attribution on their stories. Since 2016, we’re only ever published on HackerNoon.com and in our migration have done the extra work to properly associate author bios in our upcoming infrastructure. It’s time consuming. There may be some hiccups in the move, but we are making author bios more prominent on the story page (private beta screenshot below) and giving the author page a more prominent call to action on the profile page.

• Currently, getting canonical links from our Medium backend is pretty difficult. Contributing writers have to use the ‘import story function’ (which has been broken for most ppl over the last month) or writers can email yourfriends@medium.com to negotiate for them. In Hacker Noon 2.0, we are making it so that anyone can put the canonical link in the story submission process, and as long as they have rights to the content on their site, we will put them in.

Hope that helps clarify. I’m around if you or team ever want source for a story, and am very open to working together in some capacity. @ben & team - Cool site you made.

And of course, congrats FreeCodeCamp! They continue to change the internet. Good to see FCC taking a step towards bettering the infrastructure of their own domain.

I can't speak to how effective this would be, necessarily but authors of syndicated content with an improper canonical attribution like this could always report the syndicated post (in this case, the FreeCodeCamp article) to Google as plagiarism. This might result in Google de-indexing of the plagiarized copy, especially if a lot of original authors do it in concert about a lot of posts.

It only takes a minute, so it might be worth a shot.

google.com/webmasters/tools/spamre...

Interesting. I've posted several of my articles on FCC and didn't know about this at all!

Quincy responded, “Don't worry about the waver - just set up a time to meet with me that's convenient and I can fill you in on everything.” This definitely isn’t a carefully considered process.

Be warned: if you try to become a FreeCodeCamp author, you're required in Q4 of their application to give them the right post and edit the content of any article previously submitted to their Medium publication. It's unclear whether you'd be gaining enough access to delete your prior content or revoke permission in the future. The only 'option' for this question is 'yes.'

In the meantime, to ensure no confusion over implicit permission to copy content, I've removed my publications individually from their Medium publication, which is still accessible directly through Medium (medium.com/free-code-camp). I've also sent Quincy a DM about this and will report back if he responds.

I think there is some crypto currency platform where you write content and when people like it you get some of it and then you can exchange. Don't remember the name of the platform though.

Medium is BS unfortunately. Not saying they don't have anything great, but they kinda suck now. Because the front page right now is not the content I want to read, it's the content the medium wants me to read.

I remember signing up for medium a few years back and it was good. I was really into typography and design do it was a breath of fresh air. Then after a few months I left because I wanted to focus more on studying.
Fast forward to a few weeks back I found a couple of good articles and started reading again there. Even installed the app! And then I started getting the dreadful “3 articles” limit and thought it was absurd nonsense. If their business is about people reading, why the heck would they limit that... anyway, I don’t like medium anymore.

I was thrilled to read that FCC is leaving medium on the title of this post, I think it’s great. I still have high hopes for it, even with the concerns shared. I’m sure they will fix that soon, I see it as a hiccup or an issue they just didn’t think about in time.
I am looking forward to seeing this new platform open and functioning fully (though it won’t replace DEV, ever!)

I just found out that my leading blog post, the one that inspired my entire learn AWS course has been moved off of Medium is now on a new site: freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-host-....

Yet, I never gave permission to move this content off of Medium where I own the content. This is incredibly shady and definitely violates my rights as an author on Medium. I do not have the canonical url problem like others. But this is definitely an author attribution problem that must be resolved @ossia .

Thanks for posting this, this provides a lot of insight for me and I'm sure for others too.

@ben if you decided to switch hosting providers for dev.to or to change the underlying platform (e.g switch to Wordpress), would you feel the need to ask authors’ permission?

From my perspective, that’s all that happened here. I wrote and published articles on the freeCodeCamp blog. I expect my articles to remain on the freeCodeCamp blog unless I ask for them to be removed.

When the freeCodeCamp blog changes platform, I don’t expect to be consulted on the decision and I’m not sure why any author would be.

If I wanted my work specifically on Medium, I would have published to Medium directly, or to a publication on Medium that I own.

The canonical URL change looks like an honest mistake, but that can be handled via a simple request to freeCodeCamp and I’m sure they’d be happy to fix it.

Everyone is entitled to their point of view, but the outrage here seems a little over the top to me.

I can understand about the concerns of authors.

As a reader of development topics, medium was useless for me. Sites like dev.to, freecodecamp and hashnode provide development concentrated articles. So it will be a plus point.

For authors, freecodecamp is moving articles to their site with added advantage of more visibility which medium cannot provide under its other craps.

I hate medium for its crap and stopped using it also because of its integration with Facebook.

Finally now that they have decided, they will hopefully take some time to listen to authors' problems and figure out a solution. So need to be patient.

As of this comment, Free Code Camp news is down for maintenance, and it appears that all of the stories are accessible on Medium: medium.com/free-code-camp. Their custom URL, medium.freecodecamp.org/, does redirect to the "down for maintenance" page.