Paint us Red and Call us Santa! Our Devs Just Gifted You a Sleigh of New Features!

The below updates are reflective up to November 30, 2022

It's been a busy couple of months for HackerNoon developers on all ends. From improving website performance and design to carrying out the constant task of page indexation (go, SEO!) to expanding the website's reach by breaking the language barrier, our devs did it all. And we're so excited to tell you all about it! Continue reading to discover all our new features.

Pin Your Best Work 📌

Excellent news, Hackers! You can now pin your three favorite stories to the top of your story list, which means you can give whatever post on your profile the highlight whenever you choose to. This feature also helps you ensure your best work always shows first, representing you fairly on HackerNoon.

Moreover, you can filter your stories by latest or popularity, making browsing your content painless and personalized!

Fresh for Readers

Hackernoon in 8 Different Languages

Our readers spread far and fast, and we know how much reading your favorite articles in your mother tongue would make a difference. For that reason, we've enabled Cloud Translation API to bring you HackerNoon's top stories in foreign languages. It all started with our users: they spoke and picked Spanish as the winner, the catalyst to start us off on our translation journey!

We have used machine learning to translate all top stories on our platform from English to Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, Vietnamese, French, Portuguese, and Japanese. We will keep translating new upcoming top stories. Top stories will now see all these languages on top of the feature image.

Also, if you navigate to the tag page of a specific language, you will notice that the entire page will be in that language.

https://hackernoon.com/tagged/hackernoon-hi, for example, will only show stories in one language, in this case, Hindi. But it's the same for other languages.

This new feature helps both readers and writers. On the one hand, it allows readers to dive into HackerNoon stories in the language they’re most comfortable with. On the other hand, it helps writers have a translated version of their work, helping them reach bigger audiences - all powered by HackerNoon machines.

Click the flag button at the top of every article page to pick the language you’d like to read in or visit the homepage in your target language to enjoy the hundreds of stories already available!

Wallet Assets are 4Show

We knew we had to integrate a versatile web3 login system to accommodate future features. Building it in-house allowed us complete control of security and a wide range of tooling to help support users in their transition into web3 DAPPS, allowing them to seamlessly link into HackerNoon’s existing authorization infrastructure.

So, what does that mean for you?

You can now connect and log in with your Ethereum wallet on HackerNoon!

If you have an existing account with us, you can simply edit your profile and connect your wallet! This will allow you to take full advantage of the future features that HackerNoon will offer, as well as being able to log in directly to your account via your wallet!

You can link your Metamask, Coinbase, or any other ERC-20 wallet that you use to store your crypto! If it can hold Ethereum, Polygon, Chainlink or USDC, it will work on HackerNoon!

If you don’t have an account with us yet and would like to create one, you can do so directly on our signup page by clicking “Login with Wallet”!

HackerNoon Web3 accounts collect no additional data on you, so you can remain completely anonymous online!

And that’s it! You can now take full advantage of all the new upcoming features of the decentralized web!

Please note that, unlike most Metamasks, you can only log in with Coinbase after account creation by linking the wallet to your account. You cannot create an account using the Coinbase wallet.

On this day in Tech History…

On this day feature is done and ready to rock your world! With this new development, you can browse any day in HackerNoon history and find out what was happening at the time while reading stories published on your selected day!

What better way to keep tabs on current and past events than this?!

New Pages to Browse

Keeping in tune with the latest developments, our devs added a few pages to our listing. One of the pages making the big recent HackerNoon hits is the Tech Company Briefs. We’ve all been on the edge of our seats waiting for the weekly ranking, and now it’s easier than ever to find them. Visit hackernoon.com/tech-company-brief and enjoy current and previous company briefs!

But that’s not all! Everyone’s favorite emails turned stories are also getting a page of their own. The Noonification, full of fresh tech content, will be waiting for you on hackernoon.com/noonification. Worth the check!

And, remember polls? Each poll now has its own page! So you can keep tabs on past polls easily. And to make matters sweeter HackerNoon polls results are also currently available at the bottom of each poll - like this one. Awesome, right?

Merry Quizmas!

Who doesn't love a good quiz?! You know we do!

We've been working on quizzes for stories that track users' progress while reading them, meaning that now you can test your knowledge in real-time! At the moment, only editors hold de quiz maker stick, but everyone is open to answering. In time we hope to extend the creative power to our talented writers.

Story Stats are now prominent more than ever!

In every story, you can now access some key stats elements straight away. Is it a new story? Does it have more than ten reactions or 100 reads? Is it trending? You can find all about it on story cards!

Homepage UI Revamped

Our developers don’t cease to amaze us. This time they brought their UI expertise to improve the homepage, including updates to polls, trending, and story-card layout. Mobile also got a slice of their attention, receiving a lot of fixes, so the website looks nice and coherent on all screens.

Story Pages: The Holy Grail of Information

Surprise, surprise! We’ve made story pages prettier!

In case you haven’t noticed the changes, let us point them out for you.

It started with TL:DR: not only does it show up differently in your stories, but it also includes all coins, companies, and profiles mentioned in your text, making it easier to find what you’re looking for!

Story tags have also been resized to fit the story width, guaranteeing a coherent layout. As for images, download is now possible for every story image, and smaller feature images on stories also get a new background to maintain the ideal proportion across the website.

The author section shows a “learn more” button to answer CTA dimension limitation, and social sharing buttons no longer show on the sticky profile. Instead, you can find them under the linking option on the sticky profile along the text, with a new and improved design. Also on the sticky profile, you can now see the bookmark option, added for your convenience.

Last but not least, comments got that redesign! 🔥

Sleeker than ever, the new design offers a cleaner version of the comment section, with the added option to copy a link that will take users directly to a comment! Just click the “share” button to watch the magic happen.

These changes make it easier for our users to find all relevant information in one place. Enjoy!

Fresh for Writers

Stable Diffusion aka AI Generated Images in app.hackernoon.com

Published writers can now generate images using Stable Diffusion directly in the HackerNoon editor! 🥳 We’ve added stats (storyCouny, totalTimeReading) to the green user context to determine which users can use Stable Diffusion.

The new option at the bottom of the image upload modal allows users to create ten images an hour. If an error pops up saying NSFW content was detected, it won't count toward this limit. Just edit the prompt and try not to be so gross next time.

Anywho, type in what you'd like to see in the image and press enter or the Submit button, then wait a bit while we talk to replicate.com to generate your image. And the best part is that you won't even have to worry about image captions! We've added auto-add captions for Stable Diffusion on the main images!

Moreover, you can also opt for the mid-journey diffusion option instead. This tool produces distinct results from Stable Diffusion, creating images with richer colors and slightly more surrealist. Have fun!

NFTs as story embeds

Did you know you can embed NFTs (say what?) into your Hacker Noon stories? No? Well, that isn't too surprising because we haven't told anyone about it.

Here's what it looks like:

Paste something along the lines of…

0x495f947276749Ce646f68AC8c248420045cb7b5e#80305803031457727000169367139464419088647062543998058403747637890778052689921

… into 2.0 stories and hit enter, you will embed an NFT viewer. The 0xwhatever part is the Contract Address, and the bit after # is the token ID.

If all goes well, you will see the embedded NFT load in a matter of seconds! You can check the step-by-step guide here.

Profile Page Remodeled, Again!

Taking care of our users' profiles is our pleasure! Improving them is our passion! And that's just what we did! Profile pages are now limited to one CTA to prevent clutter, and a subscribe button is visible when viewing your own page instead of the email input form.

NFT on Profile Pages

Let it be known that you can now upload Eth- or Matic-based NFTs to your HackerNoon profile as your avatar. What’s more? It shows up bordered by the notorious identity hexagon.

Just like this:

All you have to do is link your wallet to HackerNoon and update your avatar. Click here to read the detailed instructions.

Fresh for Brands

New Partnership with Arweave

Have you seen the little “Permanent on Arweave” button under the “THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN…” section? Well, that’s because HackerNoon has struck a brand new partnership with Arweave, backing up 20k+ stories with them, making sure your precious content is never lost!

Favicons Around Web

We’re suckers for detail, and we had to zhuzh up company mentions around the web throughout the website. That’s why we included Favicons next to each company’s name, like so…

Pretty neat, right?

Go-odbye-Daddy

It’s time we address the elephant in the room: GoDaddy. If you follow our socials, you heard all about the hardship HackerNoon went through at the start of November on the account of a GoDaddy Domain.

To keep us all in the loop here's what happened. On November 1st, we received an automated email saying an article published on our site had to be taken down for violating GoDaddy ToS. The communication came via our CEO's personal email, without a phone call or any other alert given. We were given 24 hours of the message's reception to do so.

Upon review, we realized the person did make a mistake. We promptly removed the article and had a call with them to understand the matter further.

After many attempts to contact GoDaddy and speaking with various scapegoat call center workers who had no power in the matter whatsoever, we were told that this matter could only be solved by their "back office" and that the process could take from 24 to 72 hours.

So much for the 24/7 hour customer support advertised on the site.

We couldn’t stand still and watch as HackerNoon’s reputation was being tarnished and the livelihoods of every employee, writer and customer, who rely on our ad space and content publishing, were put at risk.

For that reason, HackerNoon has decided to cease its contract with GoDaddy and follow a different direction with a different partner.

Noonies Winners on Site

Winner, winner, Techies dinner!

The results for the Noonies 2022 edition are in - congratulations 2022 Award Winners!

More than 300 awards have been awarded to our nominees across categories, and your votes made a difference. With over 140K votes and 4K nominees, we couldn’t possibly have done it without the help of our marvelous community.

As for the winners, I hope you enjoy your special award and badge that you’ll be able to show off across your profile page. Don’t forget to let the world know what you’ve just achieved, and feel free to tag us while you’re at it 😉

A special thanks to our partners in crime, .TECH domains and BingX, who sponsor HackerNoon’s efforts to give back to the tech community.

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

Post written and compiled by Linh, Mónica, and David!