The below updates are reflective up to February 28, 2023

Hey Hackers!

The last couple of months have been filled with new developments: from writers’ features such as Youtube Transcript and Twitter thread embeds to readers’ features, like a flagging system, GitHub integration and story annotation.

Continue reading and be amazed by all our new shiny improvements added to the platform since our last product update on December 31st!

New for writers

Transcript Your YouTube

If you’re reading through a story and notice a little thumbnail and it’s related to a Youtube Video, then you just met our youtube transcript feature. This scrollable feature will work in parallel to the video embedded, kinda like captions, with clickable timestamps that allow you to navigate to whichever part of the video you wish.

To add it to your drafts, you need only to add the youtube link, as you would with any other link, enable embedding and pick one of the three options shown on the drop-down menu: video, transcript, video and transcript. Et voilá! Your choice will be part of your story!

Title Me Easy

We added a headline generator for you to use when you’re out of inspiration or just want help brainstorming ideas. To use it, just go to the title space, as you’d normally do, and click the lightbulb icon to get an automated headline for your story. You’re welcome!

To use it, just go to the title space, as you’d normally do, and click the lightbulb icon to get an automated headline for your story. You’re welcome!

Extra tip: if you’ve been keeping tabs on our recent stories, you’ve probably noticed a few emojis on homepage titles. And yes, you can do it too! Check the example below for some inspiration on how to spice up your title:

PS: if you're not quite ready to title your story, we have another feature to safe-keep your draft: auto save. Gone are the days of frantically clicking the "save" button every few seconds, hoping to avoid any unexpected crashes or glitches. Now, you can write with peace of mind, knowing your story is automatically saved in the background, even if you don't have a title.

More Embeds!

As we’re on the topic of editor 3.0 features, we’ve allowed new embeds on HackerNoon’s editor: Twitter threads and GitHub gists! You simply need to add your link to the draft, select the embed option, as you normally would, and watch the magic happen.

You’re a Walking Red Flag

No one likes a plagiarist, so we’ve opened a tattle tale system on HackerNoon anyone can use. Now you can select text on any story and hit the flag button on the tooltip to flag any plagiarism issue. You can also use this feature in the case of wrong information, wrong translation, broken image, or any other text issue. Comment about why someone should look at your report and hit submit. Then the flag message will arrive on the editor dashboard and set the progress of your review in motion.

Moreover, though we love AI, we don’t want a real writer’s work to be mistaken by AI labor, so we’re also implementing an AI-content detector to protect our human content poets from our machine-powered ones. Here’s how it looks:

You’re so Giphy

HackerNoon’s image uploader has a new option: Giphy. We know you love Gifs, and so do we - so, what better feature to help you brighten up your stories and comments? For the moment, this update is only available for our editors and some trusted users, like Stable Diffusion, but will be accessible to all writers soon.

Plus, you can now illustrate your comments with GIFs and images overall! Go to our comment section, and when clicking the + button, you can now select an image to upload.

In the words of Madonna, Express yourself!

Print My Story

It’s pretty clear we’re all tech-savvy, but sometimes, we get that old-school nostalgia for the smell of ink and paper. And even if you’re not a very nostalgic person *ugh feelings* you’ve probably encountered some situations that force you to have your portfolio on paper. That’s what we’re facilitating for you: if you’ve noticed a printer icon on top of the story pages, that’s an added option for you to *well, duh* print that story!

Use it however you like it but let’s keep being mindful of paper waste and our impact on the planet *wink*

New for Readers

Sign-up for our new flow

We got news for wannabe Hackers: our sign-up flow has been extra simplified! Maintaining our policy, if humans around the web are interested in reading our stories, they can, unconditionally. However, if they want to interact with HackerNoon stories - bookmark, comment, annotate, among other actions - or write a new one, they need to create an account. With that in mind, our devs have changed the way HackerNoon asks you to create an account - let's see how it works:

1. You're reading a story;
2. You want to make an annotation on that story, so you click that option;
3. You'll be taken to the sign-up page and asked to add an email and password;
4. You read and click the terms and policies checkbox;
5. And... done! You'll be assigned a handle and led back to the action you intended to do before the sign-up page.

You Got Annotated!

Do you like to give your opinion about stuff? Do you enjoy knowing people's thoughts about your writing? Buckle up, buddy: Hackernoon's new Annotation feature got you covered!

You can now select a part of the text you like and write something about it. Just highlight the text you want to annotate, click the pen tool, and write your note! Don't forget to use the green button when you're done. It's super easy and hassle-free! You can also watch this short tutorial if you're more of a visual learner. You can now have your work improved by your readers or improve other people's stories! We're all about helping each other here: do notes, not war 💚

Pull out a Curious George, and Discover our Polls

Polls have been here for some time, and we know they have become one of the highlights of your week. So now, we're putting in the time to improve this feature even more: you can choose what poll you'd like to see. How? All you have to do is select the poll category on our drop-down menu to discover a poll. Plus, polls can now have links, so your weekly quiz comes with a little something extra.

Themes Meet Top Nav!

Our cool homepage themes have been beautifying your screen for a long time, but now, they’ll also embellish your whole top nav. Just pick a theme as you usually would and watch it spill from the homepage to the rest of the navigation options.

Thank you all for being a part of the HackerNoon community!