I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics. After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical' and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all content. They did not send me a zip with the content. They could have simply deleted the offending article(s) but instead they deleted all of them.
The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed.
But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.
>When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't.
Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. When you produce content for all these mega-platforms, you're nothing more than a sharecropper... a digital one. [0]
You really have no rights and you're at the whim of the 'feudal lord' who doesn't care about you and can take all your work away in an instant. Since there's thousand others that will take your place, they really don't care about what your losses are. They hold all the power and you have absolutely no chance of remedy.
The problem with YouTube specifically, is that while blog posts are easy to host on pretty much anything that has a CPU, self-hosting videos at scale is essentially impossible. So while Medium only added a marginal amount of convenience for your average blogger, YouTube straight up enabled the kind of content it hosts.
This. And even if you manage to somehow self-host your videos, YouTube is also a discovery service for these videos. Think about how many times you looked for a video on a certain topic in YouTube's search bar itself, the recommendations and the Trending tab.
>if you manager to somehow self-host your videos...
Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
>It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 <video> tag on their own web server.
I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0])
There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point.
Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue.
Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not?
I think you and the other poster may be talking passed each other.
He seems to be trying to emphasize the relative triviality of the technical problem from building the MVP absent leveraging "someone else's computers" perspective.
You're talking about the delta and impact created by the fact we've become so dependent on someone else's computer to point us in the right direction to create the visibility and discoverability we want.
The point I think both of you are dancing around, but not hauling out into the light, is these platforms enable the abstraction of the techie work, and allow creators to just publish. Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work, that unfortunately, they are left at the mercy of the techie+business platform provider, and as a result, are vulnerable to censorship based on that platform's visibility to the world at large.
Large integrated platforms are cool and all, but at some point, we need to sit down and look at the federatability of these types of communication platforms.
We can't rely on implicit Gatekeepers not being manipulated into acting as amplifiers/dampers as circumstances warrant from their side.
>The point I think both of you are dancing around, but not hauling out into the light, is these platforms enable the abstraction of the techie work,
No, not the techie work. In both of my previous comments, I de-emphasized the technical reasons.
Instead, I've tried to emphasize that the killer feature of Youtube for the content creator is the simplifying of finances down to $0 costs for distributing video. Others may argue that "audience & discoverability" is equal to (or more important than) the $0 costs to distribute. That's valid as well.
Since a technical solution of self-hosted video web stack does not solve $0 distribution costs and audience reach, it is irrelevant to the discussion. (Context of discussion was parent comments by fiala__ & ralphstodomingo talking about "scale" and "discoverability".[0])
To add some counterbalance, it does not mean Youtube's "value proposition" of $0 payment for audience reach is always a good deal. An example of this is Netflix. They don't need nor want Youtube's servers to host videos.
>Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work,
Again, this type of statement is evidence of techies misunderstanding Youtube.
Even if the content creator hired a techie such as a webmaster to set up a self-hosted video site, it still does not solve the problem that Youtube solves.
Even if you gave a set-&-forget "video hosting web appliance" to a content creator, it still doesn't solve the same problems that Youtube solves.
In both cases of those technical solutions, you've created new problems that the content creator doesn't want to deal with!
Do you have a trustworthy source for MS "switching" to Youtube? Their self hosted videos of Build 2019 [0] is what they directed me to when i was searching for sessions. I later found Youtube versions through some other source as well (probably a link on HN), but this seems more of a PR move ("we don't do evil walled garden anymore") to me than a technical necessity.
I do agree with your core message, that video is hard and not something a small player should build their own solution for. But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch...
>But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch.
I actually said the opposite of that. I emphasized that MS had both the technical skill and money to host their own videos and yet they still moved channel9 videos to Youtube. I wanted readers to pause and think about why they did that.
By using Microsoft as an example, I was hoping to break the mental loop of always referring back to "technical issues" as the reason creators choosing Youtube. It's not technical.
We still self-host for countries where YouTube isn’t available (or if something goes down), but for Channel 9 anyway[1], we’ve moved to YouTube because that’s where the audience is and it makes sense to be where our users expect us to be.
This isn’t about video being hard; our internal player is pretty good and works everywhere (which is not true for YouTube). This was a conscientious decision to go to where our audience is. We still have a self-hosted backup for each video, complete with captions in a variety of languages. But we’d heard repeatedly that our users preferred using YouTube to discover content and not being there didn’t make sense. This isn’t true for all Microsoft content, but for our developer focused videos, we want to be where the community is.
If it was a PR move, is "we don't do evil walled garden anymore" more important than "Azure rocks and we do a lot of shit with it, look at this case study"?
Okay, you're clearly missing the point here. Sure, you can upload them videos and put them in a page somewhere, hosted by a web server somewhere. But why would you do that?
The cost of keeping your videos accessible are higher than keeping a typical blog accessible. Storage and bandwidth are obvious ones. How do you get ad networks to monetize your videos, if you want to? How'd you get people to discover your videos, as they are not first-class citizens of a search result page? Where do people even watch videos these days? Everything is on Facebook or YouTube.
You can somehow self-host your videos, but even if you manage to do so, your original purpose for doing it in the first place won't be met, it simply isn't worth it.
Contrast this with Medium, where there are not as many benefits for letting them benefit from your content. Hosting plaintext or markup is trivial, easier to maintain a blog with stuff like Wordpress than to learn how to manage your own server directly to optimize for video. There are a lot of aggregators like HN and Reddit that are populated mostly by blog content, and even if you don't resort to these, your pages are first-class eligible citizens in search results.
Heck, even the policy regarding discussions not being actively shown may hurt your specific type of content. Moderation is tolerable with Disqus, for example.
It ranks well, but you rarely go on Medium's search bar or feed. I'd usually be here in HN, or Reddit, or some aggregator, where your self-hosted content can be found.
Self-hosting some very niche videos? Sure. Trying to make a generally popular channel? Forget it.
It's the transfer and bandwidth that are the problem. There isn't really such a thing as "unlimited transfer" (there's a hidden limit past which they'll rate-limit you, and kindly ask to stop or pay more). Moreover, once your video gets somewhat popular, you'll hit bandwidth issues. Given how popularity on the Internet seems to happen in spikes, this will likely severely limit the reach of your video.
People are also spoiled by big video services with unlimited budgets and CDNs all around the world.
If you want your media to be readily available despite your limited bandwidth the answer is torrent. If you still want to have control on who does what, then you're out of luck.
Also consider their automatic video encoding / re-encoding / resizing; I think there's services (e.g. Amazon Elastic Transcoder) that can do that for you, but that would require some development time of your own.
Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?
Those things are easily done with tools like ffmpeg and mbox. This stuff isn't rocket science. These are all solved problems and the tools are free and open-source. And yes, there are video format that are supported by all browsers.
The number of naysayers that are implying that working with videos is so hard in these comments is shocking to me for such a supposedly technical group of people.
It's better to keep in mind that promises of unlimited traffic usually countered by fine text provisions, which your hosting company will invoke once your website starts to be a nuisance for them. Various companies have different levels of tolerance, and actually it's a sort of problem with these "unlimited" offers that you won't know when it hits.
I asked them and for up to 40TB/month it's okay. This is 80000 views of 10 minutes full hd video. The chance that someone gets this popular is quite small.
If you are really really popular investing in a cdn is likely the only solution and for this you need some money, be it from advertising, donations or memberships. But this is the same on Youtube too, only that Youtube does the advertising for you and takes a cut.
Try it. Also there is Cloudflare doing a video CDN. I don't think they have a free plan with that, but it would be interesting to see what the costs actually are. There should not be a need for a CDN though if you are only showing a few videos to a few people. Video does the buffering thing so it should be possible to serve video half way across the world.
I would give it a go myself but I only have audio!
No, it's not difficult to do at all. Another commenter said "if you manage to somehow self-host your videos..." Somehow manage to self-host videos? They make it sound as difficult as managing to somehow write my own web browser from scratch. Self-hosting videos is relatively easy. The benefit of youtube isn't that it can somehow host my videos.
Care to elaborate? I find this rather a sweeping statement and quite inconsistent with the level of activity and progress being made in the p2p sphere.
Fair comment. Unfortunately (for me!) I'm going to have to look like a bit of a wally. I can't elaborate on it and my stance has changed in the time since I posted (while looking up my former 'facts').
1) Based on the GDPR comment. If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information (never let a user associate IP with any other PI - e.g. if a user can ban another from their channel something, don't let them see the underlying IP ban in place. Not sure how IPs are handled across ActivityPub).
2) People scared of p2p.. I'm still on the fence a little. For instance the opt out issue at Peertube[1] displays a snippet of p2p-fear however it should be noted that a feature to opt out of the p2p part is implemented in Peertube specifically now so may just be a non-issue. p2p fear needs to be determined with a simple "do users use this opt-out" before I can sway one way or the other
You got a source on that if you're going to be referring to the rest of us as a peanut gallery?
Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
> You got a source on that if you're going to be referring to the rest of us as a peanut gallery?
Nothing that isn't privileged information, unfortunately.
> Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
Recital 30 (https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/) says "in particular" when combined with other information, but the addition of that phrase indicates this is not the only case. The accuracy of your statement depends on how you interpret that recital. Based on this case (https://www.alstonprivacy.com/ecj-declares-ip-addresses-pers...) I suspect the broader interpretation is the one that would win over regulators.
Additionally, the information about that case states there is clear agreement that static IPs are personal data, which alone contradicts your belief.
p2p is widely useful technology, but in the minds of regular people, it's primarily associated with movie and videogame piracy. I don't know how common this is world-wide, but at least in my country it's widely known among people who use computers that downloading or streaming a copyright-protected video from a random site is legally in the clean, but p2p may land you in jail or have you paying fines - because it's unlawful distribution, not consumption, of copyrighted material that's punished.
> Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc.
One big difference with Youtube is you don't create your work on their platform directly. You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube so you have a copy of your work by default.
With Medium, chances are you wrote the article directly on their platform so now if it gets removed from their site you probably don't have a local copy of it so it's gone forever unless it got scraped somewhere.
In either case I think Medium is really bad and I wouldn't use it.
> You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube
I can't speak to how popular this feature actually is, but the YouTube app includes video recording, so not everyone is going have a local copy of their work, by default. Conversely, who uses the Medium editor, rather than, say, Google Docs?
I thought some about this, and I am a bit afraid about "feudal lords" of some other kind:
I'm starting to self-host my content and services as I am starting to have some income (beginning of my career). However, I have to pay for a domain name, internet access, etc. I can afford to pay all of this right now, but I have no guarantees that the content will remain available in the future. The biggest unknown for me is the domain name, as it sounds much like a single point of failure: what if my registrar closes, or refuses to do business with me, or if I can't afford it anymore? Medium provides some relief against this, but not enough that I would care to use it.
How could this be "solved"?
Ideally, I could write a static page, sign it with a private key (maybe associated to a human-compatible string), and then host it in multiple places. A search engine could pick the right mirror, and interested people could choose to mirror the content.
This sounds a bit similar to IPFS, but with the possibility of picking your hosting place and the content you mirror.
And to write something more about paid apps vs. add-based ones (which cropped up later in the discussion thread), when I was younder (kid/student), I was unfortunately in no position to buy paid apps (no income), nor to self host myself (I tried multiple times, but it was a pain to host even static content at the time). It seems to be getting better (github education pack, github/lab pages, etc), but I think that we as a society should think more about what is made available to kids. A free dynamic DNS and hosting service should probably be a minimal offer if you want to make them interested in tech. It could be also a good plan (though long-term) for a hosting platform to gain their trust/mindshare. Also making nice apps freely available to them.
Unfortunately, I had no e-mail address provided by my high school at the time or earlier, so I wouldn't have been able to get a github student pack (if it existed). I think that's something that should be solved at he state level.
There are specific measures in place to protect you from your registrar closing or refusing to do business with you.
If you can't afford a few dollars a year for your domain name, you likely have bigger problems. If ICANN disappears, we all have bigger problems.
Your solution is interesting, however hosting other people's content is fraught with danger. If I ran such a host, I'd assume within minutes I'd be hosting potentially illegal content. How would your system prevent that?
The stuff about kids just reminds me of geocities, TBH. There might be an appetite for something like that once again...
I agree with your answers, but I would like to point out that a few dollars per year isn't necessarily a trivial amount depending on who you ask. And top-level domain fees are more or less flat across countries, besides a few exceptions.
I had never heard about geocities, that's interesting, thank you for sharing this.
Now, to elaborate a bit more about what I said, I don't think there is a lack of technical solutions for this, but rather a fully integrated solution is missing.
I would like to be able to "seed"/mirror specific content, like articles that I find interesting. Of course, that wouldn't help with content I (or others) haven't read already, but you would be responsible for the content you host, as you pick it (unlike ipfs or freenet, AFAIK). Integrated in a web browser, I suppose it could also "mirror by default", though I would be concerned about leaking user-specific content (so maybe a spec/protocol extension would be necessary for html/http to tell what could be mirrored?).
It occured to me that this was a bit like "boosting" a post in mastodon. Indeed ActivityPub could be an interesting transport mechanism for this, and could be a way to propagate update notifications back. Though I am not sure the content itself is mirrored with the current mastodon "boost" implementation.
A mirror index could also be ran over DHT, while a "search engine" could provide the post hashes, and let clients fetch the content from the DHT.
The whole idea is still quite a bit rough, but it surprises me that in 2019, hosting plain text content (more or less a few images) in a future-proof way isn't a solved problem, and we still have to rely on the Web archive. Applying trusted timestamping (by a few trusted third-parties) to the web archive content would be a good start, to trust mirrored content.
> what if my registrar closes, or refuses to do business with me, or if I can't afford it anymore
If your register closes, most likely someone will buy them out with the customers. I can't imagine a registrar going bankrupt - that would require serious skills in mismanagement.
If they refuse to do business, there's a good chance you can file a dispute with someone (depending on a country) to recover the domain. (Not 100% certain, but possible)
For affordability... just choose something cheap. If you can't afford $12 / year, you likely have bigger problems then your online services being unavailable.
But regarding better solutions - ipfs is definitely good. There's also i2p/onion if you're ok with much smaller/dedicated reach. Or use the free credits on some large provider like AWS / gcp. You can host a lot as static content on S3 for ~free.
> I thought some about this, and I am a bit afraid about "feudal lords" of some other kind
I'm currently working on a platform aimed at reducing internet feudalism and would love to hear more of your concerns and what can be done to improve on the status quo.
If you're interested in talking about it and learning more about what I'm building, shoot me an email at yaniv@mynexus.io
Hi, wanted to offer a little help! You can still use The Internet Archive (or the WayBack Machine, as it is popularly called) [https://archive.org/web/web.php] to find and download your articles.
It is very helpful and I once used it download some articles/pages for my friend from her blogging website. The website had got blocked as it was a paid domain, which she purchased from GoDaddy and her 1 year subscription got over.
> I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google.
This highlights one of the ways Google has gone off-piste. The host or platform shouldn't affect your ranking/SEO this much. The same article on two platforms show rank side-by-side when searching by content. There's no reason to trust Medium above other platforms.
> The host or platform shouldn't affect your ranking/SEO this much.
This is true for medium, but not universally true. It's pretty reasonable to rank an article in a well known credible publication than a random blog, as there is likely some editorial quality checks in the publication. However, with medium, there is no editorial check, they just know how to game the system better than a casual blogger.
>> I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed.
But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.
Well fuck alt right too! They can get their own website after all. Why should Medium or any other company have to host their shit? People act like they have some kind of right to have their crap hosted by someone else. Companies are not public services after all.
You can either make things a public service, try to codify into law what content a business must and must not engage in faster than content changes, or have some content businesses are not going to host.
And it doesn't have to be universal. E.g. you could decide DNS and internet access need to be a public service but since those two are always available you don't need to try to regulate the content on VPS since self hosting is an option.
> I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google
Is this the main/only reason people blog on Medium, or are there others? It seems like something that would be easy enough to develop an open source, self hostable version of, but with Google now deranking small, independent sites, Medium would be hard to beat from an SEO standpoint.
Personally, depending on my mood, if I have the obnoxious "sign in" prompt that medium and others give I'll maybe just not read the blog at all 1 time in 4. I am sure I am not the only one that gets put off by that crap.
If they had a simple sign in/sign up/dismiss prompt I wouldn't avoid it as readily.
Instead they have "pardon the interruption" and "Let's make this official". The "pardon me" politeness doesn't fly, because they recognize it as an interruption. If they are aware, then the polite thing would be to not interrupt.
And let's not make this official.
I don't want to sign up to read an article. I don't want the clap. I don't want to vote. I don't want to share my data. I just want to view the article. Maybe half way through I might even decide that the author has nothing interesting to say. 50% chance I don't want to read the full article.
There's a shifting demographic of medium readers that occurred with the recent introduction of more and more nagging on their site and plenty of blogs that moved away from medium mention it. You might still get your deserved readers if you target social medium experts and marketing managers, so good luck to those who's willing to circleyank with this.
Sure, there's a lot of reasons to prefer your own blog over Medium, if only for the sake of your readers. Earning money for many is not one of them, though.
Jekyll + Github Pages / Netlify / Surge is free with subdomain. Or you could buy .dev (or anything else) for minimal price. Personally i bought 1$ .xyz domain. Its not that “costy”.
It doesn't cost me a lot of money, indeed, and I'm happy to pay the couple of Euro's that it does. GGP suggested that you shouldn't let Medium earn money over your content, though; even if that's something you care about, it's still a better deal than paying for your blog yourself.
I understand your POV, at the same time it was free to sign up, no time investment, no yearly costs for you etc. I know how it is to be banned overnight for something that you didn't expect (and without being malevolent).
I myself write my articles on my blog and then copy them over to Medium. A bit more work but might pay off in an event like this one
Haha you now know how they maintain their SEO -- by purging the politically incorrect stuff.
BTW only druggies say "research chemicals", academic researchers just use "drugs"/"compounds" or maybe "fine organics" or the actual name of whatever it is. "Research chemicals" is basically "SWIM" in terms of being a "druggie heuristic"
RCs are a pretty common name, even among academics, at least in neurobiology (though it’s for sure recognized as “speaking in dialect/slang” as some would say... e.g., not everyone would immediately know what you’re saying).
I do agree that “compounds” or 5-HT agonists, or whatever are far more neutral (if overly broad) terms and those should be used if you’re being careful (perhaps with some added description).
> 5-HT agonists, or whatever are far more neutral (if overly broad) terms and those should be used if you’re being careful
Google ranking doesn't care how technical you are. If you do a google search about anything somewhat nutritional or health related, you get a slew of low credibility websites with dubious information. Getting to any scientifically rigorous papers is a real research project.
> If you do a google search about anything somewhat nutritional or health related, you get a slew of low credibility websites with dubious information. Getting to any scientifically rigorous papers is a real research project
It's a much easier project (though still requires some review and judgement) if you use Google scholar instead of the general search engine.
But that's true or any domain; if you are specifically looking for scientific papers, the general search engine is like going to the grocery store for lab glassware.
For some while (maybe still), there was a common belief that talking about your drug experiences online couldn't be used against you in court if you pretended it was someone else. This could be done semi-convincingly if you talked about, say, your "roommate" using drugs, but pretty quickly people started saying shit like "my cat" or "someone who isn't me" and, finally, abbreviated that to "SWIM." Like, "SWIM wants to know where to buy LSD in Seattle." Yeah.
At least some forums are discouraging that now because it obviously won't hold up in court and provides a false sense of security, but I imagine some people are still attached to it.
That is similar to the stupid IANAL preface people insist on including. Quite frankly you can literally make a post stating you are a lawyer and the following is legal advice and there would not be a single repercussion.
I always assumed that preface to mean "I'm not a lawyer, please check with one before _you_ get into trouble", more so than "I'm not a lawyer, here's my opinion and don't sue _me_ over it".
Having talked to lawyers about this -- what they end up saying is "I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer and me giving you this informal bit of information does not constitute the formation of a privileged relationship. I'm not working for you. Also, I haven't done any particular research for you and this is just based on my general experience."
And then they typically shorten the whole thing to "I think you should talk to a lawyer."
Cops are demonstrably not required to tell you they are cops. The idea that they need to was always ridiculous misinformation.
Meanwhile, as far as I'm aware, SWIM has not been the lynchpin in a court case yet, so it's hard to say one way or the other if using it as legal cover is actually a gross misconception.
It's a lot like the freemen-on-the-land folks. People think, against all evidence, that the law is a mindless machine, a slave to its inputs, unaffected by the human beings who actually administer it. They think you can hack the law by saying the right magic words, like Captain Kirk crashing an evil computer by saying "this sentence is false."
It doesn't work that way. If you try to buy 50 grams of coke off an undercover cop, no jury on earth is going to believe that you thought you were buying Coca-Cola. You're not going to get away with using a slang term universally understood to mean "me" and claiming it meant "someone else," either.
“Someone who isn’t me”, a term used when discussing something (usually illegal) the poster did or has experience with, but is using this term to hide that fact.
An annoying term that has no meaning and is completely pointless and would have no bearing in a court of law at all and everyone knows what you are saying is "I"
I wonder if anything has changed since GDPR passed as I am pretty sure you are suppose to be able to download your content but I'm not sure how that works when accounts are deleted and/or banned.
Regarding your situation and concerns of other comments...
Many people in this thread point out that marketing and creating an audience is difficult work. But I think obvious-in-hindsight solution is to always keep a backup of your own content no matter what platform you publish it on. I'm not sure how Medium interprets their rules exactly but I would be suprised if you couldn't at least link every post back to a mirror on your own blog which would let you both generate an audience and prevents you from loosing everything is medium goes nuclear on you.
As always, back up any content that you care about. Don't just backup your own content but also that of others - ever relize a youtube video you like has been taken down by a bogus DMCA claim?. Online services may have their own redundency but that doesn't matter if they decide to delete (your) content.
> pretty sure you are suppose to be able to download your content
I'm not sure that such content would count, though I'd have to review the wording of the GDPR to be sure. Its intent is to cover information about you that companies/people have collected or derived - which may not include things you have written about other things.
Even if the GDPRs "right to know what is stored about you" provisions does cover this sort of content, if they have truly deleted the it then they don't have to provide it as they don't have it to provide, and they are not compelled to keep it so that they can provide it on request. I have no idea whether they do truly delete the content in these cases or not, but they might if they've taken it offline due to a generic "inappropriate content" rule: if I deemed something posted to my site inappropriate I would want it properly gone so it couldn't be accidentally made available on my platform again due to some future cock-up on my part. Their ToS and other documentation my offer some clarity on what their policy is here.
As a side note (with somewhat insincere apologies for how snarky I am about to sound): regulations & laws aside, I tend to have little sympathy for people who keep data in an external system with no local (or otherwise independent) backup!
> I'm not sure that such content would count, though I'd have to review the wording of the GDPR to be sure. Its intent is to cover information about you that companies/people have collected or derived - which may not include things you have written about other things.
All the actual legal guidance I have seen says it does count, because the content can be cross-references with third parties to identify the author and the fact that they once posted this text on this service. This, if they close their account or delete the specific article the content must be purged.
If the content has been deleted then they don't have to give it to them. Backups aren't covered by GDPR.
> So, what are the alternatives? According to France’s GDPR supervisory authority, CNIL, organisations don’t have to delete backups when complying with the right to erasure. Nonetheless, they must clearly explain to the data subject that backups will be kept for a specified length of time (outlined in your retention policy).
It's talking about right to erasure, but it would apply for requests for personal information. They don't have to crawl through their backups for you, only the current data.
Now, obvliously, the content may contain personal data, or possibly be personal data (if it's pictures of people) and in that case I assume it would be covered.
I'm not convinced your interpretation is correct. GDPR Article 4[1] states that "personal data" means "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)", so it covers anything you produce that's somehow related to you.
In theory even the personal writing style might be considered "personal" as it could be used to identify individuals, but I don't think that lawmakers thought that far.
I could be wrong (i'm no expert) but i remember part of the GDPR is about "data portability" and is exactly that: you should easily be able to export all the data you've provided. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
I would assume this includes articles you've written.
Personal data can be used to identify you. Email, Full Name, Address, Nationality, Spoken Languages etc.
Some of these are very direct like your name and address. But since other personal data can be combined to create an identifying fingerprint of you it may or may not be covered.
There's a gray area in between of course were you really need to check the legal situation, but public content on a public forum is definitely not covered.
I'd say that while a single comment on a forum might not be enough to identify you, the sum of your comments can easily do (because of pieces of personal information you let slip in this or that comment); then everything you write must be considered personal data, unless there is a way to tell apart or remove the personal information from your comments.
Think about pictures: the picture of a landscape you took on a holiday doesn't identify you, but other pictures in your library might do (they contain faces, places, etc.). All together, the pictures can tell who you are and where you've been and when and with whom.
T&Cs may say otherwise but if they keep copies then it seems copyright law is probably better here than GDPR (which really covers PII). I'm not sure you could get them to hand over copies though (eg in their backup archives) but you could make them destroy those copies, in theory.
The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed.
But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.