[browniefed]

Technically that is all publications are. A container of posts. HackerNoon invited people to their publication to "grow a community" when in fact it's pretty much been profiting off free content with 0 hosting costs and a $70 one-time DNS hookup to medium.

[smooke]

David from Hackernoon here. We've actually been using Medium as our content management system for so long there was no fee at all. They wanted to cover the fee to recruit more publications. While we haven't paid for hosting, it has come at a tremendous cost (to name a few: medium has our reader data, our subscribers email addresses, and runs many pop up create an account ads that very much hurt our bounce rate). Tradeoff was our own little version of this https://twitter.com/JulienVallini/status/1060177021953806342 Although we also wont be paying for hosting for the next year or so b/c we got a grant from GCP https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-platform-hacker-noon-2ba... But ultimately, high traffic sites need to be smart about hosting fees, and I think our upcoming setup will be a good balance between calling the app and surfacing content from CDN. Personally, I don't think domains and people can be classified as containers, but word choice is an art and I certainly feel dehumanized by that one.