> We were relying on a lot of free technology. We’re gonna continue to have free hosting. Google gave us $100,000 grant in credits. So, that was gonna be our largest non people expense. So, that’s definitely reducing a lot of risk.

Interesting. Why would Google do this? Is it a bet that Hackernoon will get big enough that having them locked in to Firebase will pay off in the end?

I don't like the medium paywall stuff, but I'm finding myself annoyed by Hackernoon's "Medium is bad" positioning.

I posted a few things on Medium, and got contacted by Hackernoon (and some other publications) about putting them on their "publication", which I allowed (and later removed). So presumably this happened a lot and lots of Hackernoon pieces came from Hackernoon contacting people using Medium, and those people putting things into a Medium publication called Hackernoon, via Medium.

So some business model drama happened and now neither party is happy, and Hackernoon is moving away and that seems fine.

I don't think they're wrong to move off Medium, but their positioning - that Medium is a big bad preventing publications and authors from moving - seems like bullshit. There is clearly a muddled symbiotic relationship here, neither is wrong, neither is right.

Tl;dr This is giving me a very poor opinion of Hackernoon.

what's wrong with the old school static website? maybe with some fancy backend for contributors but that's it right?

Both medium and hackernoon seem to hate mobile users.