HackerNoon allows open contributors[0], but they have licensed their content to appear in accordance with Medium's terms of use. Since HackerNoon wishes to move off Medium's platform, HackerNoon must get content creators to accept their own terms of use instead of Medium's.

[0]: https://contribute.hackernoon.com/

Ah that makes sense thank you.

Also seems like, yeah that's not a good way to actually own any content.

The issue is that there is no “part of Hackernoon”. There’s just Medium. Hackernoon used Medium as a publishing platform, but really they’re just a grouping of Medium content with no special ownership or rights over the content. An unfortunate position for a publisher to be in.

The key here is that hacker noon publishes exclusively on hackernoon.com, and the majority of our contributors have agreed to continuing doing so.

“Hackernoon.com” is a domain. Nothing is published on a domain. It’s published on a server or platform the domain points to. In the case of Hackernoon, that platform was Medium. Medium is the publisher, the hackernoon editors were doing unpaid work for Medium.