Why I didn’t leave Medium with HackerNoon

I can’t write stuff like this post in pencil because I would snap the points off with barely contained rage.

Last year, I wrote a post about Sextech that got picked up by Medium’s newsletter. I actually started my Medium account to post it — I originally wrote it for the 1871.com newsletter and it was so good I wanted to easily share it with my friends. In a way, that’s the start of this entire odyssey because that post got me noticed by HackerNoon.

For those of you who do not know, HackerNoon is a publication that got its start here on Medium and quickly blew up. I wasn’t aware of them before so I was impressed when they contacted me. The one thing that bugged me was that I had to not make any money off my articles that I published with them. This is a function of Medium and its platform that I get — only the platform owner is going to make meaningful revenue off its platform, that’s kind of the law of the internet. Thing is, if I publish with Medium I can make money — and I did off my first post, about $100. After I’d made my medium money, I made it available to all and published it on Hackernoon. I considered it a reprint.

I joined a large stable of people feeding them free content. The thing they didn’t know was that I had been an editor/publisher before. A long time ago, in 2000, I was the founder and publisher of gothic.net, a webzine devoted to horror fiction and occasional gothic fluff pieces. I built it with my own paycheck from various startup…