

New Reddit CEO reporting for duty - hornokplease
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo-reporting-for-duty.html

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staunch
Good luck to him. He sounds like a good choice. So glad they didn't find some
square-jawed empty suit. The fact that he heavily participates in online
communities is a very good sign.

I do hope he has a delicate touch though. It's surprisingly easy to set off
communities if you come in guns blazing. It would not be difficult to
replicate the The Great Digg Rebelling of 2010.

Probably the best thing to do would be to win over the community by making
very small and uncontroversial improvements. Nothing that is self-serving. UI
improvements, better search, nicer notifications, etc.

Increasing revenue would be _easy_ to do but very risky if it involves any new
forms of advertising. I hope they can push that one off a bit or come up with
something users don't find objectionable (which will be tough).

Reddit has grown so large with only very minor improvements over the years. It
would be a shame to have someone "fix" what ain't broke.

~~~
mthreat
I'd love to hear your ideas for improving search. IndexTank improved reddit's
search greatly when they took it over, but IndexTank is shutting down in one
month. At Searchify, we would love to power reddit's search, and are willing
to spend a good amount of resources to make sure the results are good.

~~~
Jimmie
As a reddit user here is my experience. Reddit's search tool is terrible if
you want to find a thread about a specific topic. It only searches for exact
keyword matches and only in the title, not in the thread body. Add to this the
fact that reddit users have a habit of link baiting their submission titles
such that the titles rarely have any useful information and the search
function is practically useless.

If I want to check reddit's opinion on something I have to resort to doing a
google search like "site:reddit.com lopping tree branches".

~~~
mthreat
You're correct - the current search only searches the titles. This is one of
the most common complaints, and one that we would love to help reddit fix. One
challenge is there are 5 to 10 times as many comments as there are threads. So
a search index for that would be much larger, require more machines and RAM,
and in the end it would be quite a bit more expensive for reddit to offer.

~~~
Jimmie
Oh, I understand that. The "search" feature of reddit is just so underwhelming
that it doesn't even really feel like a feature. It feels like it's just a
temporary kludge.

External sites are so much more useful it's crazy. Google lets me search
comments and I can search in subreddits using "site:reddit.com/r/subname foo".
Tineye + Karmadecay lets me even search for threads about an image or gif.

------
rdl
Yishan knows more than most people about (the importance of) community on
discussion sites, has the experience of being a major participant on LJ,
Quora, and Facebook, and the engineering/engineering management experience of
PayPal, Facebook, and some startup consulting.

I really doubt there's anyone more qualified to lead Reddit. I predict Reddit
will add stronger social networking features to try to leverage the existing
community in new ways; there has to be a reason news sites with great
engagement like Reddit, Digg, etc. sell for less than 1% of a social network
with the same stats.

He also built a pretty interesting invite-only physical tech community (like a
less-crappy version of a coworking space), but I'm somewhat biased.

(what I _really_ want is a hacker news social network, but there are reasons
that is unlikely)

I wonder if this technically makes Yishan CEO of a YC funded company...

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earbitscom
One of the smartest people I've encountered, even if it is only on Quora.
Great sense of humor, doesn't pretend to have answers on things he doesn't
know about. Probably a great guy to work with and for. Congrats, Yishan.

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jedberg
As I said on the comments there, I'm excited about this change. I just hope
they gave him sufficient leeway to do what he needs to do.

~~~
nthitz
Are you sure you are allowed to post here? :)

~~~
jedberg
Not sure why I wouldn't be. :) I'm a hacker after all.

~~~
redthrowaway
I have to say, the incongruity between your accomplishments and your website
[1] is mindboggling. You have listed on your resume, as one of your
accomplishments, that you built the tools necessary to manage 1B
pageviews/month with a _single sysadmin_... and your home page is _32 lines of
html_. Not sure I've seen such a disconnect between skills and presentation
since Knuth's homepage. [2]

[1] <http://www.jedberg.net/>

[2] <http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/>

~~~
jedberg
Thank you I think?

I don't have a lot of time to update my homepage, so it's basic. It's way down
on the bottom of my todo list to update it at some point but honestly those
links will tell you far more about me than anything I could write about
myself.

~~~
redthrowaway
>Thank you I think?

It's a sorta-kinda complement, in a roundabout way. Were you just some random
with a homepage, I would dismiss you as not being worth my attention. Knowing,
however, the amount of work you'd put into keeping reddit up under some pretty
unfavorable circumstances, you've been filed under "dudes with crazy skills
and shitty homepages".

It's a small file with some interesting names in it.

Edit: At the moment, it's pretty much just you and Knuth.

~~~
JonnieCache
How could you _possibly_ forget this?

<http://bellard.org/>

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jenius
This is awesome. I'm really interested to see how an engineer will do as CEO

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tshauck
I wish they would try politics next.

~~~
Kazurik
[http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-
top...](http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine-
government-officials-are-scientists/) The top 8 out of 9 Chinese officials are
scientists. Granted the culture and political structure are a bit different in
the West vs China.

~~~
redthrowaway
Engineers and scientists are particularly well-suited to hold office in a
communist country. The very idea of managed economies was based on the idea of
informed technocrats being able to make decisions to the benefit of all. In
fact, in the case of the Soviet Union, it worked brilliantly... until it
didn't.

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kmfrk
I'm by no means a reddit fan, but Yishan comes across as an amazing guy (kind,
bright, and insightful) on Quora, so I don't know if reddit could have chosen
a better guy for the job.

It'll be interesting to see how visible he'll be inside and outside the site.

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stef25
I hope he'll be able to do something about the declining quality of posts and
comments, although I wonder if there really is a solution for such a thing.

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willvarfar
"But as I continued the conversations, I came to understand that reddit wasn't
looking for a conventional CEO candidate, because reddit is not a conventional
company."

Kind of scary that despite years of being a redditor, he didn't know what kind
of company it was?

Perhaps he could have written it a bit more neutrally:

"But as I continued the conversations, I came to appreciate that reddit was
serious about tech and wasn't looking for a conventional CEO candidate because
reddit is not a conventional company."

~~~
freehunter
There are plenty of unconventional companies that aspire to be conventional.
Reddit could have been one of them for all anyone outside knows.

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hn_should
"Why Reddit got a new CEO and _you should too_ "

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koko775
Nice! All the best to Yishan! He'll need it, that's for sure.

[edit: Okay, apparently pointing out struggles Reddit will have in maturing is
not welcome here. Rest of post deleted.]

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zackattack
Is Quora going to get the recruiter fee?

