From Collaboration to Decentralization: What’s New on HackerNoon

HackerNoon’s monthly product update is here! 🚀 Explore collaborative writing with our new editor Chowa, discover the best templates for your stories with our updated blogging templates page, get to know HackerNoon anew with our latest design shift, and more!

This product update reflects changes to the platform from April 7th, until July 21st, 2025.

You asked, we listened. After months of ideation and development, we’re introducing your new favorite writing tool: Chowa, the collaborative text editor built for real-time teamwork.

This is your space to start a blank draft and enjoy seamless collaboration, with support for multiple authors.

Try it out! 🤍👉 Start Writing with Your People!

📝 How to Use Chowa (pronounced like Flow-a)

• Click “Start Draft” under the Chowa block – you’ll land in a whole new editor.

• Add Co-Authors: Click “Add Co-Authors” or scroll to Story Settings to invite your collaborators. They’ll get an email and notification, and your draft will appear on their dashboard.

• Fill out your title and tags, and start writing and formatting your text as you go

• Leave Comments for Co-Authors: Click the yellow speech balloon icon in the formatting bar to leave comments, suggest edits, or chat with your co-authors.

Your Writer Dashboard also Looks Different

We’ve overhauled the Writer Dashboard for clarity and speed.

Now, when you click “Start Writing,” you get three clean options:

1. Chowa: Collaborative Text Editor – Work with other authors to create your next masterpiece.
2. Blank Draft with Editor 3.0 – Prefer to write solo? Use HackerNoon’s classic editor (you know the one).
3. Import Story – Paste a URL from anywhere on the web and watch your content instantly load into a HackerNoon draft. You can then format or update it to fit your publishing goals.

Also, a lot of writing is persistence. So as you scroll down, we moved your unpublished drafts here ordered by most recently visited. This encourages bloggers to hop back into a recent draft.

💡  Need Inspiration?

Click the green arrow on the right side of your screen to open:

1. Editing Protocol – Your one-stop hub for HackerNoon’s editorial guidelines. We launched a new microsite on EditingProtocol.com to more clearly explain our human + machine approach to improving and distributing blogs at scale.
2. Blogging Templates – Choose from top templates by keyword, popularity, or category. Click “Create Draft” to start writing immediately.

We’ve revamped our design to be cleaner, faster, and cooler — embracing a smoother retro aesthetic with less clutter and more clarity. We replaced a ton of custom components in favor of Tailwind. Let’s dive in!

On the Homepage, You’ll Find:

Navigation Got a Tune-Up Too:

Top Nav:

• Read: find all your favorite topics, stories, guides and more.
• Top Blogs: click to see trending stories, most recent stories and translations.
• Write Now: find all essentials writer tools and tips, writing templates and writing contests
• Business Blogging: learn how brands can collaborate with HackerNoon to get published
• About: learn more about HackerNoon, its people and software
• More: A sidebar for everything else — shop, Web3, help center, etc.

Side Nav:

Use the hamburger menu (☰) in the top-right corner to access the full navigation, including:

Search Function (powered by Algolia): Click the search icon to immediately see top 10 trending stories, categories, and topics. Once you start typing, results filter by stories, topics, people, and companies.

Tech Category Pages & Tags

Each tech category page now includes:

New Signup Experience and Simpler Profile Settings Management

Everything starts here 👇

1. Pick how you want to sign up – Email, Gmail, GitHub, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn (yes, that one’s new!).

2. Choose your handle – This is your public identity on HackerNoon.

3. Complete your profile – Once your handle is approved, you’ll be taken to your profile settings so you can customize it to reflect you.

👤 New Profile Pages

We’ve redesigned profile settings pages to help you better represent yourself. Your info and CTAs are pinned to the left, and tabs at the top let you toggle between your bio, stories, saved quotes, comments, and more.

Want to manage your emails too? Go to the “Emails” tab and subscribe (or unsubscribe 🙁) with one click.

🗳 New Poll Design

Our revamped polls page is cleaner and info-rich. Each poll now includes the question, voting breakdown, and all user comments on the right side. You can even download the poll data!

Now you can format your comments on stories and polls using markdown — perfect for emphasis, links, and cleaner replies.

Style HackerNoon to Your taste

We’ve upgraded our theme picker for better customization — lighter, faster, and cleaner. Change themes via the hamburger menu > last icon on the right.

🎨 Try out our new Minty theme while you’re at it!

HackerNoon x Sia Foundation: Decentralizing Tech Publishing

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with the Sia Foundation, a non-profit focused on decentralized, cryptographic cloud infrastructure. Similar to our previous integration with Arweave, this partnership strengthens our commitment to decentralization. By using multiple decentralized protocols, we reduce dependency on any single provider and take concrete steps toward long-term resilience for independent journalism.

Over 100,000+ stories are now backed up on Sia — with 2,000+ new articles added each month — each with its individual meta-data page, like so:

Why this matters:

• Permanent, censorship-resistant publishing
• Verifiable storage
• Support for Web3 infrastructure

This project supports two critical goals:

• Advancing the future of Web3 infrastructure through real-world adoption of decentralized storage
• Strengthening the foundation of independent tech journalism by protecting content from censorship, takedowns, and platform control

Cheers to a more open and decentralized internet where stories are owned by the real contributors, not by centralized entities, gatekeepers, tech & media giants.

AI Image Editing, Built Right In

Our AI Image Generator can now edit images too. Just click on an image and then the 🔄 icon (or click the featured image). You’ll see an Edit tab where you can tell the AI how you’d like to change it.

Publishing and Contests, Now Clearer Than Ever

We’ve streamlined the Business Blogging Page to surface all the key info and perks up front — so you can get started quickly and confidently. Explore the new layout here!

The Writing Contests page also has a fresh new look. Whether you’re submitting to a contest or organizing one, the updated design is faster, cleaner, and easier to navigate. Check it out here!

Explore Our New Knowledge Hubs on hackernoon.tech

Looking for deeper insights, platform updates, or just some great reads? We’ve launched hackernoon.tech — a dedicated microsite for all things HackerNoon publishing. From new tools and announcements to niche content hubs, it’s your home for everything we’re building.

🔍 Discover These New Learning Destinations by HackerNoon:

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That’s all for now!

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