Hey Stellabelle! Thanks for your contributions to Hacker Noon — have learned a good bit about the history of crypto from you. Jumping in below —
1. “One question is how will our previously published articles (in Hacker Noon) be migrated over to your new site?”
We back up everything we publish, so we could have a mediocre site live rather quickly. But we’ve hired two developers and are making a better environment worthy of your stories — and that will probably take us until late Q1 2019. Migration starts with ensuring that all links work. Whether some stories lives on subdomain, root domain or another different hackernoon.com URL structure, our goal is to ensure that all links work in the transition. There are over 1 million backlinks to HackerNoon.com (source, ahrefs.com). We’ve learned a lot about what Hacker Noon contributors want and think we can make a much better site than we have today.
2. “Will it still interface with Medium in any way?”
Yes. No one can change their past. How exactly that looks is TBD. We are awaiting word from Medium about our transition proposal.
3. “Connecting with Medium enabled many of us to find you, so how will newer writers be able to find you in the future if not connected to Medium?”
The short answer is most of our new writers find us because they read Hacker Noon and that will remain true.
You’ve been publishing with us so long (since 2016, thank you!) that you remember the days when “request a story” was a thing on Medium — there’s been a lot of changes since that functionality existed. Hacker Noon currently gets ≈50 inbound submissions a day, many of them don’t have Medium.com accounts. Our writers submit stories to us via stories@hackernoon.com, stories@amipublications.com, amipublications.com, our personal & work emails, social channels/groups such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, Linkedin, and any other way they can find us. Currently we don’t have enough editing and curation resources to manage the demand of story submissions.
We’ve spent thousands of man hours onboarding & educating Hacker Noon writers on how to create and use a Medium account for the past 2.5 years. We think with an onboarding experience designed around how we publish, we will onboard writers more efficiently.