TOP 12 Latest, Hottest Product Features Deployed in Q1 2022: for HackerNoon Users With Love

What’s up, hackers 👋

Q1 2022 has been, as Michael Scott would have put it, “a big one,” for our product team.

In 2022 Q1, we added 203,627 lines of code and deleted 125,804 lines of code to our primary repositories, totaling 77,823 new lines of code.

All of this with the intent of making the experience of readers, writers, editors and sponsors better (in some cases, radically different).

Without further adieu, let us dive right into it!

For Our Beloved Readers

This quarter, we really doubled down on making it easier and more useful than ever to own a reader account on HackerNoon.

These top 6 features, from signing up with an Ethereum wallet, to getting a handy little “favorite” history on your profile page, are designed to do just that.

Number 1: Signup or Login to HackerNoon with Your Crypto Wallet

Now, when creating a HackerNoon account, all users can choose whether they want to use a Web 1.0 identity (email), a Web 2.0 identity (social media), or Web 3.0 identity (Ethereum wallet).

Beyond letting the user control their identity, the first practical use is distributing the NFTs to Noonies winners!

We wrote HackerNoon’s first smart contract to mint these :-)

Adding a wallet to your HackerNoon account will make it easy for writers to receive the many cash prizes via Writing Contests, and to mint and distribute more community earned NFTs like we did for Noonies.

Now, you can also use that same wallet to sign up or log in to HackerNoon! Check out our annoucement post here.

“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!”

Deployed early March, this feature is loudly & proudly our first (major) official foray into web3. Watch this space 😉🚀

Number 2: A New and Improved Search Feature (Algolia integration)

Searching for your favorite content has never been more beautiful… or instant 😉

Based on aggregate readership trends, we’ve improved our recommended stories tremendously, and expanded our search results to not only include stories, but also people, subject matter, and companies.

You can now discover anything on our site when you enter a word or phrase into the top left corner of hackernoon.com.

A relevant list of Stories, Tags, or People will appear immediately, as you type. Hit enter, and you will be directed to the familiar search page.

Number 3: Your ‘Favorites History’ On Your Profile Page

Creating a Reader Account just became a lot more appealing.

Previously, your reader profile is typically blank unless you have written a story (and become a writer instead).

Now, it will be populated with all the stories you have ever reacted to 🎉. This allows for a reader profile to showcase their curation and reading expertise, like a GoodReads profile page.

Want to go back to that amazing article you saw but can’t remember the exact title? And forgot to bookmark it? As long as you’ve reacted to it, you’ll now be able to find it! Simply visit your HackerNoon profile, and click on the favorites tab.

While there, why not check out all of your bookmarks and published stories as well?

Number 4: #StandwithUkraine added to Choose Your Color feature

We added a simple__#StandwithUkraine__ as a Choose Your Color option. Action speaks louder than words - and we hope this simple act shows solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine in a concrete way, as a tech publication 🇺🇦

Number 5: Signup or Login with Magic Link

We deployed a little ✨magic✨.

The magic link as a function as a login/signup option has run rampant through the SaaS world, and if you want only email to be your primary identity, we want to make that moment as smooth as possible.

Magic link allows users tosignup or login without a password. Visitors wishing to create an account – whether it be writers, readers, or brands can simply use the magic link and be on their way.

Number 6: Action-Based Notifications on Site

We’ve finally communicated with you with something rather than emails 😆

Simply click on the yellow bell at the top right corner of the screen to learn the latest & hottest updates from HackerNoon, as well as personalized messages whenever you perform an action on the site, such as submitting a story.

Log in to your profile and visit your brand new notification center here. And, watch this space for more notifications to come 💚

For Our Brainy Writers

This quarter, we’ve spent a lot of time iterating on the writers’ experience on HackerNoon. These are the features that have been launched in the past, made better 💪

Number 7: New Design of the Dashboard for When You Create a New Draft

There are many ways to write or contribute to HackerNoon. Writers rejoice! The verdict is in: writers largely preferEditor 3.0 (with Markdown support and Notion-like UX) to Editor 2.0 (our oldest text editor to date, which we continue to support too). We made the Editor 3.0 NPMJS package publicly available :-)

So - we made it much easier for writers to choose Editor 3.0 when creating a new draft.

Number 8:  Import Stories

Speaking of a new design for New Draft, you can now import your own story from another URL directly to Editor 3.0!

When you start a new draft, simply click 'import story' and insert the link into the 'paste URL here' popup box. This feature preserves URLs, images, headings, bullet lists, and even tables! You may still need to do some minor reformatting but it will save you a lot of time.

Side Note: editorially, HackerNoon does prioritize original content over republished stories. See The Pros and Cons of Import Story Function for more details.

Number 9:  See Your Notes History

We launched this handy Writer / Editor Notes feature back in August last year as a way for editors and writers to communicate with each other in-app on specific stories.

Since launch, editors have started using this feature to educate writers on writing best practices, while writers use it to communicate their doubts or concerns, or in some cases, eagerness to be published.

All in all, communication has been streamlined more than ever.

Now, all users also have access to the entire history of their notes by simply logging in to their account and clicking on “Notes” (or https://app.hackernoon.com/my-notes)

Watch this space as we will develop the feature further to include ability to sort and search through notes.

Number 10: View Those Who Reacted to Your Stories

Curious to know who is giving your stories that sweet emoji support? Now you can!

Go to your published content, and click on the number beside the emojis, and even check out the profile of your (not very) secret admirers 💚

For Our Iconic Brands

These are the features deployed to make the life of our 1000+ sponsors (that make HackerNoon possible for users) easier.

Number 11: Audio Sponsorships

On HackerNoon, you can always count on 1 of 4 robots (Dr.One, Ms. Hacker, Madam Beckham, and Ali Mohat) to read any particular story.

Readers love this feature (it gets about 500 clicks a day); and now, sponsors get to enjoy it too.

Sponsors simply need to provide us with a simple ad, link, logo, and leave the rest for our sponsor team (and the robots) 🎉

Number 12: Tech Company News Pages for Startups of the Year Winners

Over 1000 tech pages were created for the winners of Startups. You can see region-specific winners here. We also open sourced the data so that others can use this information to better learn where startups trend.

Besides Business Overview, Mentions around the web, and Stories on HackerNoon, Tech Company News Pages for Startups of the Year winners also feature a neat little one-liner that links to their win on the main Startups site, like demonstrated below.

Six More Features to Note

• Improved Site Map: a SEO best practice, our site map is now auto-generated to ensure all stories and pages are updated automatically and get noticed by web crawlers instantaneously.

  
  

• Training Algolia: besides instant search, we’ve been training Algolia’s AI to improve the accuracy of related stories’ algorithms. Learn more here.

  
  

• Editor Stats 2.0: a more accurate and useful view of the editorial dashboard is now available for our staff editors. It includes numbers of stories submitted, edited, scheduled, and rejected per week, by each individual editor, completed with a weekly log that is downloadable as a CSV.

  
  

• Updated Writer Stats: visit https://app.hackernoon.com/stats and you can now see the total impressions generated by your profile and about page. While there, you can also download the AI-powered audio of each of your stories.

  
  

• Live Reactions on Homepage: scroll down a little on homepage, below the top 5 stories, and you can see who just reacted to a recent story.

  
  

• Full Page Feature on Story Settings: annoyed easily by how small and cluttered those fields in story settings can feel? Now you can extend Story Settings to a Full Page and type in notes, meta descriptions, TL;DR, or search tags at ease. This feature is subtle so be sure to look for the little expansion icon in the top left corner of the Story Settings.

  
  

Upcoming WIP Functionalities We Are Excited About:

• Coin pages that track prices with stories and histories of all cryptocurrencies with a $1B+ market cap.

  
  

• Site-wide comments!!!

  
  

• A new brand dashboard with Stripe-integration for all sponsorship options.

  
  

• A new backup system for all pages (hooray!)

  
  

• Performance improvements, performance improvements, performance improvements.

  
  

• And more!

As always - watch this space for more frequent and smaller updates from now on. If you have questions or suggestions about any of our features, feel free to @ us on social, or shoot us an email on [email protected]!

See you next time!

The HackerNoon Product Team