I'm Jason Libsch, VP of Product and Technology. You can yell at me about pretty much anything software related- the design of new pages, new moderation rules and robots, application performance- or make feature request. Or ask me about anything- they tell me that's the rules. My goal since starting here two years ago has been to make the design of DailyKos speak to the community and content, and to guide the continuing development effort so that the site is a more stable and efficient platform for building and refining user friendly features. From day to day the job varies greatly. This is the most stressful job I've ever loved- trolls, bot swarms, hurricanes hitting our datacenter just days before the presidential election, pie fights, and… reddit users (No, really, I love Reddit, but hey guys, maybe stick around long enough to actually
read the article. Just a thought).
Recently we launched new Sign Up and Log In pages. There are some great stories here, my favorite are the formation and flourishing of the Mentors group who welcome first time commenters to DailyKos, and the 5x (or so) increase in first time comments per day. Looks like the community is growing.
Coming up: comments and recs to the mobile version of DailyKos. We often roll out new features to mobile first as there is about 5x less traffic there, so its a good place to test server performance. We've been working steadily on a new Front Page, Diary, Comment Page, but we won't be able to launch this work until the Story Editor is also rebuilt. Design of the Story Page is in the works, so now is a great time to get your design criticism of the current editor and feature requests in.
In a previous life, I built exhibits at the Exploratorium, and still spend a lot of time building things in my small garage woodshop. At the moment it seems to be frames of one sort or another.
New Front page, Diary Page Design
New Comment Interface