Cent’s fresh new logo

As most of you know, a few short days ago Cent unveiled a grip of new updates and functions. And they’re pretty great.

So let’s start by quickly recapping all of the updates

New and improved logo. Check. Tipping. Check. In-app search. Check.

We also added: the option to switch between column UI / grid UI, sharing, historical stats, commenting on bounty posts, time stamps to responses, a new notification button, new font, some slick CSS blur transitions, and a live button to toggle between either only live bounty posts or every post to date including both live and expired bounty posts.

Okay, that pretty much covers all the new updates. And while that’s great and all, many of you may be wondering how to make use of some (or maybe most) of these new features. In this installment of the Cent Spotlight series, we’ll look at a few examples and use cases to help illustrate how Centians can incorporate the new updates into their regular Cent experience.

Examine Earlier Bounty Posts With Search

One hypothesis that the Cent team has held since very early on, is that many of the bounty posts and the curated lists of “best” responses linked to them may hold and provide some sort of evergreen value to users.

Cent is approaching its first birthday and - as of this writing - over 640 bounty posts have appeared on Cent. To be sure, it is still extremely early days and while the early bounties and responses may not exactly be a mountain of valuable info (yet), they are nevertheless still a great, untapped resource that have just been sitting on Cent.

That is until we added search in this latest update.

So how can Centians use search to approach these early bounty posts?

Users can start by making sure the ‘live’ switch on the bottom right of the screen is switched off. This view will allow users to scroll through every bounty ever posted to Cent — including bounties that are still live.

As most Centians have probably already seen by now, we’ve added search to Cent in the top left corner of the Cent tool (props to the amazing team at Algolia for putting out a product that was a breeze to incorporate btw). While fellow Centian @Houwang was not wrong when he commented that the current search function is still limited, there are certain terms that provide great responses.

Some solid examples of keywords that bring up pretty great results include:

🔎 Best

🔎 Cent

🔎 Invest

Try doing individual searches for each of those words to see what I’m talking about.

Remember that the search results will populate in reverse chronological order, so new bounty posts will appear towards the top with the earliest posts at the bottom.

I did a search, now how should I “read through” early bounties?

As many of you know, every bounty, regardless of when it may have ended, leaves behind a curated set of responses.

Throughout each iteration to Cent, the team has focused on trying to improve the way responses are ranked so that the best responses end up at the top and the worst responses are kept out of sight towards the bottom.

So if you don’t have a lot of time you should still be able to read some good responses by skimming through the top of each list.

For users with a little bit more time to spend reading deep into lists, you will most likely discover that there are some truly great responses that didn’t make it to the top of lists. The chances of this being the case increase as you click on earlier early bounty posts.

Now that I found some really good responses, what should I do?

One of the biggest new features added is the ability for users to send tips to other users.

Unlike tipping on other platforms, tipping on Cent can be used a couple different ways. Tipping was originally envisaged as a feature that would primarily provide bounty posters the ability to granularly focus their bounty dollars across specific responses.

While the bounties attached to posts will continue to only be distributed to the top 10 responses based on Centian curation, tipping will allow bounty posters to equitably distribute bounties across potentially larger number of compliant responses. Tipping will also enable bounty posters to carry out winner-take-all bounty pay outs.

Additionally, tipping can also be used as a way to reward truly great responses to earlier bounties in a way that may spark and re-start conversations with their original posters.

This is just the start for Cent - there is so much more to come

Hopefully the new updates are a bit clearer and you have a better idea how you can incorporate them into your daily Cent experience now.

The Cent team will continue to work on iterating and providing the best product we can, so please keep sending us your good vibes and suggestions to hello@cent.co - we’re listening.

In the meantime enjoy all of the new updates everyone, and Cent on.