StockTwits 50 was an editorial product built on the StockTwits platform — a curated showcase of the top fifty stock-trading setups posted by bloggers in the StockTwits community. Rather than a generic blog template that surfaced posts by recency, it was a deliberately designed publication that lifted the network’s strongest trading ideas above the firehose of the main stream.
Curation as the editorial product
The interesting design problem on a curated editorial property inside a community platform is making the curation itself feel like the product. The StockTwits community was already producing thousands of trading-setup posts per week across the main stream. Anyone could read what was new. The value the StockTwits 50 added was the editorial decision of which fifty setups, out of all the candidates, were worth promoting that cycle — and the theme had to make that editorial judgement visible to the reader.
That shaped the build. Each setup needed clear provenance back to the original blogger whose post had been selected — not just a byline, but a structured attribution that read as “this is the work of this trader, surfaced here because we judged it worth surfacing.” Section landing pages needed to feel like a publication’s table of contents rather than a feed of recent posts. The article template had to give each individual setup the room it needed for the chart, the thesis, the entry-and-exit reasoning, and the link back to the contributor’s full post. The result was a property that read as deliberately edited rather than algorithmically aggregated, which was the editorial position the StockTwits 50 was meant to occupy.
The third property in the sequence
The StockTwits 50 was the third of the StockTwits property builds in the early 2011 ecosystem expansion, following the corporate blog (live January 2011) and StockTwits U (live February 2011), and running in parallel with StockTwits FX. A standalone domain at stocktwits50.com redirected immediately to a subdomain install at stocktwits50.stocktwits.com — the kind of arrangement that lets a property carry its own brand without fragmenting away from the parent platform’s domain authority. The period write-up on christopherross.ca was published March 1, 2011.
- The work: Custom WordPress® theme for a curated editorial showcase at stocktwits50.stocktwits.com; curation-as-product design language
- Platform: WordPress, custom theme; migration component for the property’s incoming content
- Period: February / early March 2011
- Client: StockTwits (Howard Lindzon, co-founder)
- Position in the ecosystem: Editorial-curation product inside the spring 2011 buildout
The curation-as-editorial-product pattern shows up in any community platform that grows past the point where the firehose can serve as the discovery surface. Reddit’s front page, Hacker News, Product Hunt, every newsletter built around “the best of the week from [community]” — all are versions of the same idea. The build challenge is always the same shape: make the editorial decision visible, give the contributors their proper attribution, and design the template so the curation feels like a publication rather than a filter on someone else’s feed.
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