Things of note on Hashnode's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

Before starting this, I did something that may be surprising: I actually read the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use.

Disclaimer: I don't have any formal legal knowledge and this is not official legal advice. Get in touch with a lawyer to get professional advice on the matter.

Also, keep in mind that I read the documents at the time of publication of this article and they are subject to change in the future.

Privacy Policy

The Privacy Policy seems pretty standard, with a lot of usage tracking but nothing particularly worrisome.

Terms of Use

The Terms of Use are also very typical, and resemble the ones from similar content platforms. Even if you are using a custom domain, Hashnode is still hosting your content and is responsible for moderating anything illegal/harmful.

In my opinion, who is using Hashnode to bootstrap a blog before moving it to my own page, the most important section is "15. Your Content; Licenses".

There, it ensures we keep all ownership of our content (a must for the value proposition of the platform). But there is a clause that is very important to know:

However, with respect to Your Content, you grant Hashnode a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s) to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display Your Content on the Websites and/or Service, regardless of your termination or deletion of your account.

This was not an issue for me, since I don't need full distribution control for my personal blog, but may be important for other people or different use cases.

A second point that may give you pause is the following statement:

Hashnode may, from time to time, provide you with the ability to import or export Your Content to or from other websites or services. If you choose to import or export any of Your Content, you acknowledge that doing so does not violate the terms of the other such website and/or service.

The wording here protects Hashnode if the import/exporting functions doesn't work or are removed in the future.

I am using the Git backups, so at least my published articles will be continually backed up. If you are not using an automatic back up, I advise you to do an export from time to time, to ensure you have an external copy of your content if anything happens in the future.

The final point is that, if you are planning to use the Sponsors feature, while Hashnode does not take any cut from the revenue right now, the document clearly states that this might change in the future, as described in section "5. Commercial Use of Service."

Conclusion

Reading through the docs, it seems most terms are pretty fair. I described the ones that may be more complicated to other people, but for my usage they are not troublesome. But as stated, get professional legal help if you really need to be sure you should be using the platform.