Meet the Staff! An Interview with Ari Lamstein

If you regularly use the Q&A feature on our site, you’re very familiar with Ari Lamstein’s work. He has been improving and refining that feature for quite some time now, and has made some magnificent changes!

As the latest installment in our Meet the Staff series, we’ve given Ari some of the questions you’ve asked of HubPages staff in the forums along with some fun Q&A-specific questions you might enjoy.

If, after reading this interview, any lingering questions remain… well, that’s what our Answers feature is for!

Are you reading all the Questions and Answers in the Q and A section? -prettydarkhorse

There was a period when I actually did read all of the Questions and Answers published each day. But now there are just too many for me to keep up!

Do you read Hubs for enjoyment? – rebekahELLE

Yes I do. Most days I’ll spend some time in the feed looking at new Hubs that are created. It’s amazing to see how much high quality content is generated on HubPages every day.

Does HP have any Friday traditions? Things like casual day, big box of donuts next to the coffee machine, group lunch at TGIF, etc. – paradigmsearch

We have a team lunch every Thursday.

What motivates you to do the things you do for HubPages? -ripplemaker

I think that we provide a valuable service, and it’s one that I enjoy using myself. I like writing, and think that it’s valuable to provide people with a platform to moneitze their own writing online.

Describe your ideal Hubber? -Marcy Goodfleisch

One who writes about classical music, of course 🙂

What feature on Q&A are you most proud of working on?

I think that transferring ownership of Q&A to Question askers has been an important and fundamental shift to the feature. The basic work there was shifting the Questions to each user’s subdomain and providing basic statistical information to users. More interesting was giving users moderation control: the ability to delete Answers that they feel are not helpful, as well giving users the ability to comment on Answers. I’ve been very encouaged to see how this has improved Q&A, and look forward to see how it evolves over time.

What feature on Notifications are you most proud of working on?

I think that the “auto” aspect of notifications was interesting from a mathematical and data analysis perspective. It also added a lot of value to our users, because it increased the quality of email that we send them.

What feature that you worked on surprised you the most?

I did not expect online notifications to be as much of a hit as they are. We get many more clicks on online notifications than email notifications; I expected it to be the other way around.