At Hacker Noon, we measure success by the number and quality of words published on our platform. Previously, we were singularly focused on carving out a space for our contributing authors to publish long-form tech stories. We've hacked 2 commenting systems to enable readers to contribute words in response to those stories...but those words live stashed away in cardboard boxes in story basements.
So we put on our reader hats and tried to imagine the value of contributing words in the form of comments. After some philosophical discussion about trees falling in forests, we decided our thoughtful comments need a better home. So we tapped into the Disqus API and hacked together a leaderboard.
🏆 leaders.hackernoon.com 🏆
In the first version of our leaderboard, we're ranking the top comments from all of Hacker Noon, bubble sorted by engagement. More upvotes = more points.
If you are an OG desktop user, you'll see the original story in the right margin when you hover over a comment. If you're a millennial mobile user, we figure you lack patience for context so we just show the list of comments. Just kidding, this is just v1. 🤓 We plan to keep iterating to make the leaderboard fully featured on all clients. Even the pesky ones we can't believe aren't deprecated by now.
Potential iterations 👨🎤🎨
- Monthly Leaderboard
We'd really like to have a forever home for Joe Blogger's epic comment in May 2020. - Profile Page Integration
Show comments on writer profiles. - Awards & Badges
When readers go to author profiles, they should see a pixelated representation of their personal epic comments. - Story Leaderboard
We'll likely have tabs to toggle between the comment leaderboard and a top stories leaderboard. - Upvoting
People should be able to easily upvote comments from the leaderboard. - What else?
Let us know what would motivate you as a commenter on our public roadmap.
Leaderboard Props 🎉
Props to Austin for pushing us to build a leaderboard, prototyping the interface and building the leaderboard backend.
Props to Storm for building scaffolding for our NextJS app to make this easy to hack and deploy.