Comment by Syed Fazle Rahman on "How can I become more involved with Hashnode?"

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. :)

It's just a shame that the Discord channels are very quiet, so usually there are no answers or very late answers - that doesn't add much up to feel connected as Todd talks about.

I also miss out the old programs such as Evangalist. I also feel some of the new feature and design changes you have made makes the site a bit more anonymous. Every time I click on something on the front page, I am sent to a new tab and maybe the blogs are a bit too individual, I'm not sure. There was a time where it was more about asking questions than telling stories, I miss that time because that's where the community build up together. The simple design is a shame because you had a great design in the past.

But to make it not just sound like a rant, because it's not, the 'atmosphere' is great and I never see anyone disregarding each other, which is a thing that happens a lot on almost any other tech focused site.

The site gets bigger with more activity, but never forget the personal touch, that's what brought me here. After I signed up in 2016 I wrote a few feedbacks and you were fast to give me a personal response to that, that's something that really works for me and the reason I think I stayed.

Also please bring back a bug tracker on the site and the feature vote page :-) I find bugs now and then, but it's too much work to go to Github and create an issue. The feature request system was a great way to involve the community.

Hey Emil Moe,

I am sorry you feel that way. We take our discord and github feedback very seriously. Practically it's not possible to reply to all the messages, but we make sure to respond to most of the messages that are directed to us.

Syed Fazle Rahman

It might sound more dramatic that I meant to. I'm very happy for your work here, but I feel it's not always in the right direction. The unity or community feeling is what I think your main advantage is, so that's an important key feature for you. Also you are fast to reply to threads such as this, means you are very connected (not to but) with the community (with is more important than to - two ways) 👍

About Discord, it's always very hard because it's not how much you write, but in general people should be involving for it to work, in my opinion. Not just posting about other stuff they make.

Just remember we are many people from many parts of the world, and here where I'm from it's normal to be critical without meaning anything negative, so I don't hope we interpret it in a completely different way. My experience from traveling a lot is that interpretation is often where misunderstandings happens.

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.

Thanks for the nice words, Todd. Feedback like yours motivates the whole team to do better every day. :)

We have worked very hard to get stories to the system. There were days when Hashnode used to get only Q&A and no stories. Developer stories are an important part of any developer-related website. In a way, we consider that as a success.

Hashnode is going through a phase where we are learning how to best showcase both stories and discussions on the platform. We are constantly improving and making design changes frequently. Yours and Emil Moe's feedback are really important and we'll have internal discussions on it very soon.

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