Launching CryptoPanic Hub or Getting Back to the Original Idea
Not many know it, but the original idea of CryptoPanic wasn’t an aggregator. I am a big fan of HackerNews and ProductHunt and I always felt there is a need for a similar site dedicated to cryptocurrency. One day I cloned one of my existing projects about skydiving with similar news and voting functionality and without even changing color theme the CryptoPanic was born.
However after launch I quickly realised I have so called “Chicken and egg problem” — there was not enough community to post interesting links and why would community grow if there are no interesting links to view. So that moment I had an idea of aggregating content and letting users vote on existing posts. Few nights of heavy coding and v2 — an aggregator was born.
Very soon another complete redesign was made and CryptoPanic became much more similar to what you see now — the v3. I’ll leave story of how the “dark version” came into life for another blog post in the future.
The important lesson here is that even if project doesn’t succeed at first, keep iterating, keep changing, test it as early as possible and don’t spend years building something without knowing if it will work at all.
However by changing into aggregation platform CryptoPanic lost one important feature — ability for users to post interesting content by themselves, but I always knew we will make this feature sometime again and that time has finally come!
CryptoPanic Hub
CryptoPanic Hub is a place for users to share interesting and useful content, discuss, ask questions, showcase cryptocurrency projects, ideas and prototypes or post crypto job offers.
We’ve split Hub content into four types — Regular, Show, Ask and Jobs.
“Show” is meant for showing your project/product/idea to CryptoPanic community. Do not use this tool for promotion, instead use this type to get feedback from our audience, test your on-boarding and conversion rates and general interest into your product. Consider adding personal message in description and special offers to users coming from CryptoPanic to increase conversion rate.
If you have a question or struggling to understand some aspects of cryptocurrency feel free to use “Ask” type to ask a question to our community. Even more — “Ask” type allows you to create “Polls” and get community opinions on topics you're interested in or making research.
“Jobs” is pretty straight-forward –a job opportunity or if you're looking for a co-founder may go into “jobs” category. If you have a landing page already, posting title short description and link to it is enough, but you can also post full job offer as well.
If your post doesn’t match any of previously mentioned ones, it should go under “Regular” type, where anything interesting, useful and worth mentioning in cryptocurrency world is allowed.
Sorting
While news are always sorted by date, posts in the hub are sorted by votes over certain period of time using similar “trendiness” algorithms you see on sites like HackerNews and Reddit. This also means that popular posts will stay longer in the top and discussions on the topic will be much more productive than on the news, which rotate out very quickly.
Summary
There are lot more going on in crypto space besides news and I hope this new feature will take our community and communication between users to a new level.
Once we measure average activity, posting useful and upvoted content will increase your reputation points. If you spot any interesting content or link, don't hesitate to post it to CryptoPanic Hub!
As always feedback is much welcomed, and you can leave your thoughts here.
