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New Reddit CEO reporting for duty
- jenius 15y agoThis is awesome. I'm really interested to see how an engineer will do as CEO
- tshauck 15y agoI wish they would try politics next.
- Kazurik 15y agohttp://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine-government-officials-are-scientists/ http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top... 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 15y agoEngineers 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.
- Zephyr314 15y agoThe current Chancellor of Germany is a good example. I think the US is a long way from that happening though (at that level).
- DrJokepu 15y agoActually, this is fairly common, about the third of CEOs have a degree in engineering.
- tbeseda 15y agoI'd be really interested in where that data comes from. Mind sharing?
- edwardy20 15y agoHere you go: http://blog.identified.com/2012/01/new-identified-research-reveals-engineers-far-more-likely-than-mbas-to-build-and-run-companies.html http://blog.identified.com/2012/01/new-identified-research-r...
- bicknergseng 15y agoThose charts make it look like over 50% of CEOs have engineering degrees. They're missing liberal arts and science degrees. Still, cool to see how a degree in engineering hardly limits you to the trenches.
- rjhackin 15y agoAs long as they don't become more like conventional CEO's and forget they were once writing code having lot of fun building applications and solving issues on day to day basis. Now that they are CEO's asking questions which makes you think..were they engineers before? I hope he doesn't turn to conventional.
- kn0thing 15y agoreddit has always been an unconventional company, we're betting an engineer (with strong understanding of community) will do just fine.
- jedberg 15y agoAs 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.
- redthrowaway 15y agoDo you know what the current status is of reddit's spin-off?
- jedberg 15y agoI do not. As far as I know they are (and have been) a totally independent company since September.
- nthitz 15y agoAre you sure you are allowed to post here? :)
- idonthack 15y agowhat, isn't this just /r/hackernews?
- jedberg 15y agoNot sure why I wouldn't be. :) I'm a hacker after all.
- redthrowaway 15y agoI 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/ http://www.jedberg.net/ [2] http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/ http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/
- zackattack 15y agoIs Quora going to get the recruiter fee?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- earbitscom 15y agoOne 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.
- kmfrk 15y agoI'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.
- Alind 15y agoChinese will take over US for sure. Chinese American president will come soon
- rdl 15y agoYishan 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...
- staunch 15y agoGood 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 15y agoI'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.
- staunch 15y agoI 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.
- jedberg 15y agoThe .02 seconds is how long the actual search took, the rest of it is how long it took for the reddit appserver to respond. You're just seeing slow reddit response times.
- willvarfar 15y ago"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 15y agoThere are plenty of unconventional companies that aspire to be conventional. Reddit could have been one of them for all anyone outside knows.
- stef25 15y agoI 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.
- koko775 15y agoNice! 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.]
- hn_should 15y ago"Why Reddit got a new CEO and you should too"