Slogging, Blockchain, and Innovations in Crowdsourced Content: Interview With Founder Of HackerNoon

An interview with David Smooke, Founder of HackerNoon, and new ways to turn remote teams’ chatter into publishable content.

Founded in 2016, HackerNoon is an independent technology media publishing platform founded and run by David Smooke and Linh Dao Smooke. The site works with over 7,000 contributing writers — an innovative approach to crowdsourcing content — and publishes about 30 stories per day.

That, along with a certain editorial point of view and personality on tech stories, has garnered a loyal following.

David Smooke, CEO & Founder of HackerNoon, said in an interview on the Growth Manifesto podcast: “…Our model is contributors own their content, and they give it a non-exclusive license to HackerNoon, and we can edit and distribute it. <…>it’s between social media and traditional publishing.

If you publish on Forbes, it’s a lot of pitching; it’s a lot of back and forth, it’s kind of a clunky login and submission of content.

So having a good contributor experience is there, but every post goes through a second human, and there are quality control issues, there are content improvement efforts, so that’s like just a better experience.