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.
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.