I see the same dynamic but credit the exact reverse. Hacker Noon accumulated followers by aggregating articles that were already published on Medium. They were publishing 30 articles a day without adding any editorial value. That got the flywheel going where since they were a big publication, authors would submit directly to them.
But all they did was aggregate Medium users and authors without adding any additional value.
FYI - Tony is medium advisor. Unsure why he is making it his job to make uninformed comments like this. This is David from Hackernoon, letting you know that without the use of Medium at my last job, I recruited, edited and published 400+ contributing writers with the use of Wordpress. When I started there, the company started with no brand, 5 employees and barely any seed money. When I left, it had 120 employees, $60M+ in Venture capital, a brand everyone in the recruiting space knew, and I couldn't publish contributors fast enough. Medium helped grow Hacker Noon, but if what Tony is saying were true, there would be thousands of publications just as big as Hacker Noon building with Medium's content management system. Also, most stories published with us are not already on Medium, we have to painstakingly onboard them to be a Medium writer while Medium does little to distribute any of our stories anymore. We've spent thousands of work hours educating people on ppl on how to use this content management system.
It's true that initally, Hacker Noon was just picking articles that were already published. My point still stands though that this added a lot of value for me as a content producer because those same articles didn't get much attention before they were included in Hacker Noon.
Then I started publishing straight to Hacker Noon because I knew that my article would for sure at least get a couple of thousand reads no matter what; and the most useful articles ended up getting almost 100K reads (highly trageted too; almost all software developers). I don't think it could have happened without Hacker Noon.
As an open source developer who spent thousands of hours working on a project without making profit from it, I can attest that in the current system, it does not matter who does the actual work. It's who can capitalize on that work who takes the profit. I'm pretty sure that Medium has profited from hundreds of open source projects as well. There is no point to try to moralize this.
But all they did was aggregate Medium users and authors without adding any additional value.