We’ll make our own bot!

With recommendations! And…

Reddit has been a fantastic resource for getting the word out about what we’re doing with Slant. To give something back, we’ve decided it’s time to bring what we’re doing straight to reddit. Posts and comments asking for recommendations are constant on many subreddits, and recommendations are totally our thing!

Stuart, one of our founders, approached me in mid-May about writing a bot to do automated searches in response to reddit comments. We sat down and hammered out a few details. We wanted it to be really helpful, not just an advertisement for Slant, so the top answer is emphasized and links directly to a relevant website, not back to us. But we’ve got a lot of useful info that won’t fit in a small, clean reddit comment, so there are also a couple of less-prominent links to relevant pages on Slant.

Our WhatAreTheBest bot premiered Monday, June 1, in the subreddit /r/androidgaming. Here’s an actual user interaction:

It’s been received so well that its introductory post is currently pinned to the top of the sub’s listing — and subreddits only get to have one sticky post, so that’s a real place of honor! It’s already seen some improvements from user feedback, and I hope to get the go-ahead to enable it in more subs soon.