Hacker Noon Reader Survey Results

Four months ago we started this Hacker Noon Reader Survey to improve your experience reading on Hacker Noon. We have been pouring over the results, learning how we can improve our site.

It’s a long time coming, but I’m so excited to finally share the results with y’all. To find out who the winners for our 3 prizes, an interview with our editor-in-chief David Smooke, and two 0.5ETH prizes (it was a more glamorous prize when we announced the survey — oh the price of ETH) stay tuned to the end!

But first, thank you to our 412 respondents who took time out of your day to answer the survey. Thanks to you, we are much better equipped to design Hacker Noon 2.0. If you’ve read the story we share on our crowdfunding page recently, you know that Hacker Noon is planning to build our own Content Management System. We will build Hacker Noon 2.0 around our publishing workflow and of course, around what YOU, the Hacker Noon readers, want.

Hacker Noon 2.0: how hackers make the most out of their mother-f***ing afternoon!!!

1. What topic(s) are you currently reading on Hacker Noon?

A lot of you read multiple topics on Hacker Noon. It’s interesting to me that the most true-and-trial stories on Hacker Noon are the long-form analyses of technical challenges. A lot of you mention reading Hacker Noon to “learn how to code”,“because I care about programming”, or, my favorite “to read any topic that can make me think big”.

A majority of the articles featured on HN are interesting, and the lack of a “members only” paywall makes HN a daily stop. — says reader from Seattle, WA.

2. What topic(s) do you want more of?

Aside from the expected topics that y’all already like to read in Hacker Noon 1.0, 4 topics stand out to me as deserving more attention in Hacker Noon 2.0: Security, Futurism, Decentralization & Large Tech Companies. If you’d like to publish a story about these topics, please email Stories@HackerNoon.com.

We will definitely take these learnings and apply them to the design of Hacker Noon 2.0. One feature that I’m particularly pumped about is the community editors: people who demonstrate themselves to be experts by topic will have the power to curate pages, increase distribution and publish other writers.

Organize content by user selection! — say reader from NC, USA.

3. On a scale of zero to ten how likely are you to recommend Hacker Noon to a friend or colleague?

This question essentially is for us to measure Hacker Noon’s NPS (Net Promoter Score). You calculate the score by subtracting the number of detractors (0–6) from the number of promoters (9–10) and divided by the number of total respondents. A NPS can have a value from -100 to +100. If your NPS is a positive number, it’s considered good. A score above 50 is considered excellent.

Hacker Noon’s NPS is 51.13.

This means a lot to us. An NPS of 51.13 essentially means you trust us as a resource for your tech read, and we do not take that for granted. Hacker Noon 2.0 will strive to be the best place for tech professionals to read & publish.

Some of my friends aren’t coders, but for tech oriented people then absolutely (I would recommend)— says a reader from the US.

4. Would you be interested in a standalone Hacker Noon app?

This information helps inform us that a mobile app, though potentially useful, is not what most of Hacker Noon readers want at the moment. Today, the vast majority of readers read us on desktop. In Hacker Noon 2.0, we will optimize reading for both desktop & mobile users. And even though 47% is less than half, we have 200k+ daily readers, so if 47% used a standalone mobile app, there would still be a lot of readers more satisfied than they are today.

An app would be nuts! Great articles. — says reader from Bavaria, Denmark.

4. Would you be interested in a Hacker Noon podcast?

The responses to this question make me so happy! 71% of you say you want (and maybe need? :P) a podcast. And guess what? We do have a podcast now! We acquired Crypto Disrupted by Trent Lapinski, a long time Hacker Noon contributor who’s now the host of the Hacker Noon podcast. Check out the transcripts to all the most recent episodes on Trent’s profile.

A podcast will be a great idea. — says reader from San Paolo, Brazil.

5. Would you be interested in attending in-person Hacker Noon events?

To read an article on a site, and then want to go to an event by that site, is quite a leap. We think 57% of readers wanting to take that leap is significant and worth considering throwing Hacker Noon events in 2019. But where? Below are the list of 8 locations we might organize a Hacker Noon event next, based on how popular they are among your responses.

1. San Francisco, CA, USA
2. New York City, NY, USA
3. India
4. London, UK
5. Germany
6. Canada
7. Italy
8. Australia

Yay, international! If you want an event in your city, let us know by commenting on this post.

6. Have you invested in one or more startup?

Startup investing is typically an activity for the wealthy, so 29% isn’t a super low number for this question but we certainly wish it were higher. I believe by the time our equity crowdfunding is over, this chart could change. Today marks the 7th day since we launched the campaign and so far, 365 investors have invested a total of $441k in Hacker Noon, many of whom are first-time investors! Equity crowdfunding is a great equalizer since the Jobs Act of 2015, allowing anyone, including non-accredited investors, to buy shares in a private company for as little as $100.

thank YOU Andrey Sergeenkov!!!

Become a first-time investor by investing in Hacker Noon today.

7. Have you ever made a cryptocurrency investment?

Considering our demographic, this is not surprising to me. A lot of our readers are early crypto-adopters. We publish a lot about bitcoin, blockchain and more crypto stories.

Good news — with our equity crowdfund campaign, you can invest in many forms, including Bitcoin & Ethereum besides the traditional ACH, wire transfer or Credit/Debit Card.

Make a crypto-investment in our leading crypto-publication today.

8. Have you founded or been part of a founding team at a startup?

How cool is this! Over two out of five of our readers have founded a company. This is why in Hacker Noon 2.0, it’d be so important to empower the contributing writers to have their own call-to-actions that drive real activity for their own businesses. Use cases for these CTAs include software demos, software purchases, email newsletter subscriptions, ebooks, long-form reports, consulting services, jobs, and more.

We know you want, & need, distribution for your business. We’d love to help you gain your own audience by replacing the “follow” button with the “give email” button on the contributor’s page. What does it matter how many followers you have if you can’t even email them when needed?

9. General Feedback

Lots of good feedback from the community — thank you! One constant feedback we receive is about how green Hacker Noon is. #painfullygreen.

A dark theme for the website would be nice — says reader from Belgium.

We get it. In Hacker Noon 2.0, we will consider making the green less prominent, particularly so it won’t be so hard to read for some readers. But please go to minute 5:30 of the video below to understand why green is in our DNA.

Below is my absolute favorite feedback from a reader from San Diego, USA. It is so thoughtful and we will definitely incorporate this particular idea of gamification into the design of the new site! In Hacker Noon 2.0, verified writers with proven track records will gain the rights to self-publish. We will no longer be a bottleneck in this whole process.

I’d love, love, love to see a gamification system for writers. There’d be a leveling system fueled by claps and number of articles published and read. Those who achieve Grandmaster status attain the power to self-publish, a la Medium. Imagine the time and effort the AMI team could save during the submission/review/approval/publication processes. There’d be a bot that checks for grammar and TOS violations but I imagine none of the frequent contributors would intentionally put up bad content. I strive to publish an article on Medium every couple of days, sometimes quicker. And every time one of them reaches Hacker Noon, I feel like I leveled up and get so excited that I tweet about it. Now, my current backlog of Medium submissions awaiting HN publication numbers 11, the first on the list submitted 12 days ago. I get it. You guys are busy and there are heaps of submissions to wrangle. People go on vacation or quit or get sick. Stuff just happens within any organization.But when I go for nearly 2 weeks without anything to tweet about, I feel as if I’m slacking, which certainly isn’t the case. I research and write every day. Point is, so you can free up more time for the team and so I can stop bothering you about submissions, it’d be a win/win if contributors who’ve proven themselves to provide high-quality content had the ability to self-publish to Hacker Noon. Thanks for your positive contributions to the blockchain industry. And, thank you for putting together a fun survey allowing us to have a voice. — says reader from San Diego, CA.

10. And the winners are….

Tony Reynolds for an interview with editor-in-chief David Smooke.

and

m***********@gmail.com and BlockchainAuthor, for two 0.5 ETH prizes.

2 out of 3 of you have answered to my email. I will wait for 24 hours to reach out to the next person if I haven’t heard back from you.

And don’t forget to own shares in Hacker Noon today!

Hacker Noon Reader Survey Results was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.