After Medium began censoring certain cryptocurrency posts, decentralization advocate Aragon decided to move to a new platform. Will others follow?
You probably didn't notice.
Sometime between March and June, Medium, a publishing platform ubiquitous in the blockchain sphere, updated a page called "Cryptocurrencies on Medium." (ETHNews reached out to Medium for this article but did not receive a reply.)
In the post, the publisher sets out rules "for companies announcing ICOs, coins or tokens." A quick reading of the guidelines suggests that Medium wanted to curtail fraud. Article posters, for instance, were told they must verify their email address and provide contact information on their website.
In the updated terms[1], there's also a list of things users may not do:
"You may not:
- Use an anonymous email address which is not linked to your project domain. (e.g., gmail, protonmail, mail.ru, etc.)
- Advertise or participate in bounty campaigns, pump and dumps, reviewing for reward, or other forms of brigading or inauthentic activity.
- Include naked links or shortened URLs in your posts.
- Use or re-use content templates with slight modifications across multiple posts and accounts.
- Include multiple wallet addresses (or similar) in a post."
Note: Somewhat hypocritically, Medium has its own bug bounty program.[2]
Not everyone is cool with those restrictions. (And it's not just spammers and ICO con artists.) In a blog post[3] Wednesday, blockchain project Aragon, which just announced[4] it is creating a "decentralized altruistic community" with Giveth, declares why it takes umbrage:
"What this means, for example, is that as we move closer to the Mainnet launch of the Aragon Core platform and we want to write a blog post about our live bug bounties, Medium would censor that post with the threat of suspending our
