The Internet is full of noise and repackaged/regurgitated information. At HackerNoon, we aim to make everything we publish as original as possible. We look for stories that have never been published anywhere else on the web.

If you’re publishing about something trending, you know that 1000s of other writers are doing the same. Thus, you should find unique angles, quotes, data that hasn’t been widely covered yet.

How We Measure Originality

We have a built-in tool in our editor dashboard that tells us how much of your story is:

• Copy-pasted from a story already published elsewhere

• Paraphrased from a story already published elsewhere

• Similar in meaning to a story already published elsewhere

The report looks something like this:

We use this tool to ban the dirty, dirty plagiarizers.

But we also use it to tell us how much of a story is original. Chances are if you’re talking about something like “ChatGPT Explained”, you will have similar explanations to other articles already published online. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t help much for originality.

If we find that most of your piece is unoriginal, we may ask you to add some new points/angles/headings to make your story fresh before resubmitting.

After all, just because a topic is covered by thousands of writers doesn’t mean you can’t create original content around it. Amidst the sea of “Urrmagerddd ChatGPT IS AMAZING” articles, we can create viral gems like this that explain how Isaac Asimov Inadvertently Invented Modern Prompt Engineering.

Original Images

One aspect that can make you stand out from the crowd is with striking visuals! However, images can be difficult to create and expensive to license. To help you out, we’ve built and AI image generator that can make amazing images like this one in a matter of seconds:

The image above was made just by typing a prompt into our image uploader and waiting 20-30 seconds.

You can learn more about our AI image generator and how to use it here:

https://hackernoon.com/ai-image-generation-in-the-hackernoon-editor-with-stable-diffusion?embedable=true

Editing Protocol Index:

1. Editing Protocol Overview

   1. Second Human Rule

      1. Verified Writers

   2. Time to Review

2. Standards of Quality

   1. Originality Score
   2. 6 Ws Score
   3. Objectivity in ranked listicles
   4. Unranked listicles
   5. Actionable advice

3. Red Flags

   1. Subject Matter

      1. Subject matter saturation

   2. Plagiarism

   3. Sources and Citations

   4. Formatting is bad or broken

   5. Grammar level: gibberish

   6. Story is Too Short

4. Backlink Rules & Guidelines

   1. Backlink Limits

   2. Backlink quality and diversity

      1. Diversity of sources
      2. Internal linking
      3. Changing links

   3. Reposting and Canonical Linking

      1. Canonical links to company domain
      2. Canonical links to blog networks or social networks