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Comment by the_greyd | Hacker News Reader

I get what you are saying - "Practice what you Preach", but wouldn't blame the author for using Medium for reaching a broader audience. Many developers do use Medium. Advocacy which is done on invasive but popular platforms such as Facebook, and Medium (which is not the worst but still) is better than Advocacy done in a way aligning with each and every ideological belief that you have. Those two do not have to be mutually exclusive, but sadly the current scenario is different.

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Is it really? RMS doesn't appear to have a problem reaching as broad of an audience as is willing to listen to him, and afaik he does not compromise his principles by using non-free software.

I disagree with the statement. But let me make this clear, I think RMS is great, and plays a very important role in todays society. He has an exceptional devotion to his ideology, but seen from a normal person's eyes, he is an extremist. For this normal person,(and the masses in general) abstaining from propriety services is not the solution. You cannot expect everybody to just install Linux and start using FOSS alternatives (as things are now). The barrier to entry is too high.

The end result is that we are trapped in our own bubbles, preaching to only those who already agree with us. Ideological purity goes on to alienate people. The new generation of computer scientists, developers are not exposed to these ideas, because they are not as accessible. They are using facebook, slack and medium, and we refrain to use those. These are tradeoffs, and clearly, there is needs to be a balance.

And by tradeoff, you mean you are giving your usage, which is all these platforms really want from you, and in exchange, you get the ability to reach an audience who is not interested in the ideology you're preaching. Is that accurate?

RMS also has had many years to build up a notable reputation where he doesn't need to.

That's still encouraging the problem though. It's extremely easy to set up a blog on your own system and share it.

Which is not the point? On Medium you get things like Recommendation, better discoverability. Which would help it get to people who don't read HN.

You can post on your site and send people there from social media, cross-post to medium/tumblr/... Medium even is "nice enough" to give you links to "this was first published at", including rel=canonical links to hopefully make search engines happy.

How is that not the point? The point you are making is that you are OK with them sacrificing principles to reach a larger audience, is it not?

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