To boost my article visibility on the fractured internet, reposting to larger platforms is my strategy to grow and HackerNoon has been my choice for years.
However, this platform is a boat which sinks even faster than Medium. I have been rejected arbitrarily by the editor earlier this year just for minor formatting improvements, which is still tolerable.
This time, they not only rejected my submission, but also banned me from the platform for no reason whatsoever. I can’t find any information in my Inbox, notifications or anywhere else. Whenever I’m trying to edit or write a post, I get a red warning saying “You have been banned”.
Here are the posts I was trying to submit with my assumptions:
- How to Scan, OCR and Share a Book Anonymously
- Risk factor: mentioning several shadow libraries and teaching people how to fight against copyright surveillance.
- Bypassing YouTube IP block with FreeTube and optimized Tor
- Risk factor: advocating user disobedience and provide countermeasures against technical controls by a tech giant.
For whatever reason triggered this deplatforming (whether I am really violated their TOS or not), I’m leaving HackerNoon for sure.
I mentioned before that Mastodon is very interesting to me, especially some servers like DEFCON.social and infosec.exchange. But they are not a real alternative to HackerNoon, and Plume/WriteFreely are having the same problem as this Hugo blog. Unfortunately, I passed Fediverse once again.
There are a few alternatives such as Hashnode, Dev.to and Substack, I knew that Substack is more suitable for GenAI/LLM topics but Dev.to is more towards hands-on tutorials. But perhaps it’s time to try something different, like YouTube. Converting text into video content feels challenging enough for me to get very excited.