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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
I haven't thought about it that much, but I've noticed very high latency using IndexTank recently. Probably a proxying problem or something because it always reports a fast search time even when it isn't. It takes 10 seconds but says 0.02 seconds. You can't search comments at all. No date range support. No stemming.
It'd be cool if they outsourced it to someone like you who would put more time into it.
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.