Learn Any Technology via the HackerNoon Story Classification System (HSCS)

Libraries have put so much thought into where books go. The Dewey Decimal System, designed in 1877, changed book location from acquisition order based to relative topics based. But it’s been awhile. Long before the internet. As the HackerNoon library approaches 100k+ stories, we’ve made some updates to how we organize stories, and in this post I also wanted to summarize how we classify stories.

Starts at Home

The HackerNoon homepage is the leading indicator for trust in HackerNoon’s curation. It leads with 5 stories tagged by editors as top stories.

Staff editor’s top stories are curated many places, like the Noonification newsletter. The homepage continues with a series of community-powered widgets: technology polls, trending techbeat stories, and trending tech companies.

These elements draw attention to what’s organically resonating with our community - and concludes with a long list of recent stories from trending tech tags.

With the above elements we combine two things: staff-powered curation, and community-powered curation.

If you want to see what our expert editors consider the best content on the platform any given day, you can see that at the top of the homepage.

If you’d rather see what the community values (and they vote with their eyeballs), you can see which stories attracted the most eyeballs on our techbeat page.

Topics (new)

Topics are made of categories and tags. Each HackerNoon story has one category and eight tags.

Categories (new)

[screenshot of parent category page]

Every HackerNoon story can have only one category. This limitation drives quality curation because it forces an answer to question of what is the top level category of this story? Categories include their own tech brief newsletter, story audio feed, and category homepage. List of (new) category pages (links to be added):

• Blockchain
• Business
• Cryptocurrency
• Cybersecurity
• Data Science
• Futurism
• Gaming
• Good Company
• Finance
• Life Hacking
• Management
• Media
• Open Source
• Product Management
• Programming
• Remote
• Science
• Startups
• Tech Companies
• Tech Stories
• Writing

Tags

Every story on HackerNoon has 8 subject matter tags. Tags are chosen or written by the stories’ writer/s and editor/s.

Our CMS also uses AI suggestions, based on the story‘s text and the our library, to suggest more relevant tags to choose. All final decisions on which tag publish on which story lie with the editor.

Tags appear at the end of the story page, and each tag has its own page on HackerNoon (example, #bitcoin, #software-development, #technology). You can also search all the tags via /tagged (pictured below), our general search, or even combine them via the super-tag.

Credibility Indicators

Adding context to content allows for grouping of stories into different types, characteristics and cross referencing with content identifiers like tags and categories. Emoji credibility indicators allow writers to suggest and editors to verify things like original reporting, on-the-ground reporting, vested interest, news, reviews, guides, and more.

This further adds to curation ability on the platform not only by subject matter, but also story format. We want to give our readers full transparency and our writers the ability to be fully transparent whenever they may have a bias or vested interest with any product or company mentioned in their work.

Aggregating Company (and Coin Data)

No website exists independent of the internet. Beyond the people, the technology industry is driven by companies. At HackerNoon, in addition to reader interest on our site, we aggregate mentions, interest, and sentiment that surrounds tech companies around the web.

Readership Data into Community Curation

Ultimately, time reading created is the metric that makes HackerNoon sustainable. Without readers, we’re simply trees in the woods that no one knows where we fall or grow a new branch.

Curation such as live reader reactions, the tech beat and our (new) open source learn repo, we are amplifying the the internet’s existing demand to drive more readership to our highest performing stories.