Introducing Steemhunt: Daily ranking of effortlessly cool products fueled by STEEM blockchain

Are you a product person? An early-adopter who tries to live in the future? An enthusiast who loves to share and discuss cool-new products?

We are happy to announce Steemhunt, a community-generated leaderboard that rewards people for sharing and upvoting cool new products, run on top of the STEEM blockchain.

Steemhunt: http://steemhunt.com

[Background/Motivation]

As people who are continuously seeking out new products, innovative ideas grant us lots of inspiration. We love Product Hunt, a daily product curation website since 2013. It is a great community where there are many contributors sharing and upvoting interesting products.

Because the contributions by users are crucial to maintaining a highly competitive ranking curation board everyday, we think this can be a perfect fit for STEEM-based applications where the enthusiastic product hunters can earn STEEM tokens for their dedicated activities.

Also, it can be a great place for an initial product to raise a viable amount of money, as well as to gain high user traffic. There have already been many attempts for start-ups to introduce their products on Steemit, but most just raise a small amount, or none at all, if they don’t have enough followers (it’s difficult for early-stage products to gain many followers in the beginning). On the other hand, they are able to gain attention on Steemhunt if their product concepts are unique and valuable, so it can be a good place to raise a decent amount of money. It’s even possible to break the record of highest rewarded article on Steemit when Steemhunt’s users increase. This is possible because the top 10 most popular products everyday will be more visible on Steemhunt. As the valuation of STEEM increases, Steemhunt will be a more valuable place for innovative products to be initially introduced.

Lastly, we believe that different types of content on Steemit will bring bigger user groups with a variety of content needs. So far, most Steemit posts are long and detailed articles. This narrow scope of favorable content on Steemit makes some users, who enjoy varied blogging content, lose interest. Similar to @Steepshot and @Zapple, we believe that various types of content applications will help the STEEM ecosystem grow and capture more users in the long-term.

To sum up, these are our main motivations to create Steemhunt:
A place where product hunters can gain more STEEM rewards.
A place for early-stage products to raise money and user traffic.
Varied content meeting different needs on the STEEM ecosystem.

[How to use Steemhunt]

1. Sign in with your Steemit account using SteemConnect.
   
   
   
2. Explore the daily ranking board where people share and upvote. On the main page, you will see the top 10 most upvoted products everyday (of course you can expand the panel to see the rest of the day’s rankings). The ranking is based on the amount of payouts for each product post.
   
   
   
3. You can upvote and resteem the post, and share your opinion by leaving a comment. Each piece of content is synced with its paired Steemit content.
   
   
   
4. You can share any product with its website link, name, short description, and product screenshots or related images. In the future, we plan to add further updates such as video links.
   
   
   
5. When you share the product, you can name the makers by allocating the author’s rewards from the post. The makers must be Steemit users to register. You can register as many as makers as you want.
   
   
   
6. Products that people post on Steemhunt will compete together on a daily basis. The day will change according to the South Korean time zone (GMT+9). In other words, after reaching midnight, a new day of competition will begin.
   
   

[Types of Products to Post]

At first, we want to narrow it down to tech-based products only, which may be web/mobile apps, solutions, APIs, or tech gadgets. All products MUST have a website or application URL for people to experience.

Also, we hope that people will vote for something “COOL” based on their own standards. The definition of cool is different for everyone. Here are some suggestions as to what may define coolness.

1. Something newly launched that you think is brilliant.
2. Something substantially updated or upgraded that you think will affect many users positively.
3. Something not many people have observed, even if the product has been launched a while ago, that you think will be interesting for many people to discover.

Again, Steemhunt is a decentralized community, which doesn’t have any hidden algorithms to increase or decrease the rank of a product. Ranking will be completely based on people’s upvotes. We may develop a tool later to restrain ranking abuses in order to maintain a fair ranking platform, but we will always strive to limit censorship on the posted products.

[Design]

1. Logo and Brand Persona
   Steemhunt’s logo represents hunters who have an ability to discover “effortlessly cool” products and bring them to our inspirational community.
   
   
   
2. Colors and Typeface
   
   
   
3. Layout and Interface
   Steemhunt has an experimental “double-sided” view. The right-hand side is where users can post, change, or communicate directly. This is also where the main ranking leaderboard is located. It shows the top 10 most rewarded products per day. The left-hand side shows the information you select in more detail.
   
   
   
4. Responsive
   It was difficult to make a responsive design for Steemhunt because of its challenging layout - the double-sided view. Of course it’s not possible to divide a small mobile view into two sides, so we made the right side the main mobile view and when you click on an item, the left side pops up with further details.
   
   
   

[Development]

Steemhunt is an open-source project under the MIT license. You can see the full source code on: https://github.com/Steemhunt. The Steemhunt project was bootstrapped with Steemiz and Create React App projects. We appreciate their hard work and thank them for sharing such great code.

Stacks we used:

• Front-end: React 16 / Redux 3 / AntDesign for front-end framewokrs / SteemConnect v2
• Back-end: Ruby on Rails 5 / Nginx / Puma / PostgreSQL

We haven’t figured out the contribution guidelines yet as this is our first open-source project, but we welcome anyone interested in contributing. If you’re open-source savvy, please contact us on our Telegram channel and help us to make Steemhunt even better.

[Steemhunt’s Competitive Edge]

1. STEEM Rewards for Your Product Hunting Actions
   Steemhunt is a ranking curation community run by dedicated hunters who share and upvote cool products everyday, just like Product Hunt (PH), a daily product curation website since 2013. However, with the PH platform, all the rewards go to PH for their monetisation instead of the dedicated community members.
   In Steemhunt, hunters will enjoy the built-in reward-earning mechanisms of the STEEM cryptocurrency by digging out cool new products and bringing them to our community, as well as upvoting them.

2. Transparency
   What do you think is the most important aspect of running a ranking leaderboard? Of course it’s transparency. People should be able to figure out why this product rank is higher than others. Unfortunately, people never know the logic of the ranking system in Product Hunt or Reddit.
   On the other hand, anybody can clearly see and figure out the ranking logic in Steemhunt by looking at the immutable STEEM blockchain data. This is the most transparent ranking community in the world.

3. Ad-free Curations
   Like other amazing STEEM-based applications, Steemhunt also runs without advertising. We choose to do this as we believe advertisements ruin the user experience of community services. Our only monetisation plan is to collect 10% of the rewards to pay for the operation of Steemhunt.

[Vision - Decentralized Product Hunting Community]

In the future, we plan to bring Steemhunt beyond the IT section. We’d like to make a 100% decentralized product ranking community run by passionate early-adopters hunting the coolest and newest fashions, gadgets, home & living products, toys, art crafts, jewellery, and anything else that people want to see in our unbiased daily rankings. We want to create a type of people’s front page with the newest products in a decentralized community.

[Team]

• @tabris - Development
• @project7 - Design

[Early Growth Plan]

1. Upvoting the Top 10 Posts a Day
   This project began humbly. The two makers - @tabris and @project7 have invested their personal pocket money into STEEM Power (SP), and everyday they will upvote all the top 10 product posts of the day. This upvoting will be performed the day after, so it won’t affect the ranking. Although this is just a small amount of money (approx. $4 - $5 SBD), we believe it may attract some great early participants.

2. Power Delegation Plan
   We will run a SP delegation incentive program once Steemhunt has enough active users. This SP delegation package will be announced with the commission rewards and automated voting bot, so that hunters on Steemhunt will get more rewards.

3. Posting on Product Hunt
   We will try to feature Steemhunt on Product Hunt. We are not sure if they will allow us to post Steemhunt on their website (because it’s a direct competitor). But regardless of the result, the attempt will help us to increase more awareness of Steemhunt outside the STEEM community.

[Steemhunt Needs Your Help]

We welcome all types of contributions such as ideas, advice, upvotes, design/dev/marketing help, or even just some words of encouragement. If you have any questions, feel free to chat to us via @tabris or @project7 on https://steemit.chat, or via our Telegram channel.

• Steemhunt Website: https://steemhunt.com/
• Source Code: https://github.com/Steemhunt
• Telegram Chat: https://t.me/joinchat/AzcqGxCV1FZ8lJHVgHOgGQ