Like all publications, HackerNoon has topics it covers and doesn’t cover.

What we publish

We mainly cover: tech, programming, blockchain, business, startups, cybersecurity, AI, gaming, and writing.

Honestly though, we are very, very lenient with this. Anything you find in our tags is something we published before and is normally fair game: https://hackernoon.com/tagged.

This includes some things that might surprise you: #open-source, #biohacking, #freelancing, #fiction, #design  and more.

Furthermore, we are overly strict about topics that tend to be spammy. Marketing and SEO, for example, is not something we publish too much of, because of all the spammers on the Internet. So when we do, we want it to be technical, with actionable advice, rather than general overviews with no technical knowledge or tips.

Trending tech like Crypto and AI tend to bring snake oil salesmen who just want to spam a backlink in an article or promote a shilly NFT project. We are overly strict about these topics too because of that.

If your story is rejected because of subject matter, either it is outside of our scope, or the content wasn’t deep enough to accept based on the subject matter.

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