Syed Fazle Rahman I've read through your suggestions. I've added the feature/bug report page as a Bookmark in my browser, I will do my best to utilize the new hashtag headings (community channels) as well.
I do look forward to the badge feature and so I will refrain from making any large feature requests for now in favor of supporting that feature to be well-developed.
That being said, I do have a couple questions for you, and then I want to leave some feedback related to Emil Moe's comments before closing. I was about to ask my questions here but I decided to ask in a new thread so that it is properly categorized for maximum visibility.
As far as comments go, first and foremost, I too have noticed that you (Syed) are very attentive to the site and I truly do feel that user feedback is important, which is awesome. It's clear to me that you are working very hard Syed, which raises my level of respect and appreciation for Hashnode and your work to a new level. These things are important to recognize; we cannot just talk about things we don't like, but we need to spend even more attention recognizing the things that we do like and the things that people do which stand out and have a large positive impact.
Syed, your positivity, hard work and dedication stand out like a sore thumb more than any other staff member I know of on any other developer website I've been to, so thank you immensely for that and I am glad to be here!
As far as feedback goes from my perspective, I think I captured the tone well in my original post, but I also want to point out that I like the new design and the site performs very fast for me, aside from a occasional hiccups within the first half second or so of the page load. If I had to summarize the "different feel" of the website, I would agree with Emil in that it seems that the site originally focused on Q&A and has shifted focus to general content production almost like a "Medium for Developers."
General content production is not bad in any way, and I enjoy and appreciate the blogging platform entirely. However, I do think consideration could be made to either have a Q&A interface with the website which prioritizes Q&A, and a "blog-reading" interface which prioritizes "stories." You guys kinda sorta already have that if i go to the menu and hit "Discussions" or "Stories," but it seems inconsistent. I have another tab open right now and I clicked "Discussions" and the top posts are not necessarily questions/Q&A format. In fact, if I click the "Recent" organizer instead of the "Popular" one, this seems to improve the situation a bit...
I'm concerned that the focus is shifting from individual question/answer content quality to somewhat of a content popularity contest. This could work, but it does change the feel of the site a bit and I could see it as being more intimidating for newbies to ask questions. I'm also sort of lost between what channels, nodes, and tags are so I'm going to create another question in /n/hashnode to clear that up for me and others who may have the same question.
Hey Todd, great question! Thanks for being an important part of the Hashnode community. I love reading your opinions and blog posts. Keep them coming. :)
Hashnode is an open community of developers and we prioritize user feedback more than anything. One of the important ways to get involved is to contribute to feature requests on our GitHub repo. You can suggest new features or improvements to existing features. Some of the recent design changes to Hashnode were made after reading feedback from various users.
Hashnode community members can also join our Discord channel and chat live with other community members or with the Hashnode team. Many developers talk to us on Discord and report crucial bugs on the platform.
As an active community member, you can also help us seed our new community channels:
We see great potential on the above channels and are fully committed to growing them.
Finally, you can also always help Hashnode by spreading the word among your colleagues or friends and invite them to join the community.
PS: We have started working on one of the most requested features, the user badges. We are working on some really cool badges and we will launch them in beta very soon. We will distribute badges to most active community members and grant them special permissions/roles. :)