Hacker Noon made a surprising move last week after the CEO David Smooke announced that Hacker Noon’s annotations and in-line comments would be stored directly on the users’ spare storage space thanks to the partnership with ERA Inc.’s GUN, a decentralized peer-to-peer database system.
Both ERA and Hacker Noon also aim to integrate more blockchain technologies into the platform in the future, although they still do not want to say what will be included. It looks like they want to see how well the current blockchain integration is (with the annotations and in-line comments), and they will only start exploring other integrations once they feel satisfied with its progress.
ERA CEO Mark Nadal specifically said that the annotations and in-line comments would be directly hosted on the readers’ devices by utilizing GUN. It’s important to know that annotations can only appear if the contributing author approves it.
Hacker Noon’s David Smooke claimed “Blockchain technology can distribute the hosting cost of running a site like ours, where people spend over 25 million minutes reading each month,”
He also claimed that it’s good for the internet to be less dependent on centralized companies and start utilizing decentralized technology, “Less dependency on central entities is essential for the internet to mature into a technology that works for the people using it.”
This blockchain integration itself was trialed back in July 2019, and it quickly satisfied both parties. Mark Nadal stated that blockchain systems could be used both quickly and at scale as the system serviced readers successfully for 48 hours (2 days).Medium Attempted To Buy Hacker Noon
Medium Attempted To Buy Hacker Noon
Back in March 2019, Smooke said in a podcast that Medium actually wanted to acquire Hacker Noon for a very low amount of money, less than a Medium marketing employee makes in a year. Eventually, Hacker Noon funded its operation through a crowdfunding campaign, with $1.07 million successfully raised from 1,200 participants.
For your information, Hacker Noon claims to be an independent publication related to technology with a tagline “how hackers start their afternoons.” It was founded in 2016 by David Smooke and Linh Dao Smooke. As of now, Hacker Noon is growing quite fast, with over 7000 writers and more than 200K daily readers. It is also believed that Hacker Noon has over 8 million page views every month.
