Jan

Ever Disappeared Down the Reddit Rabbit Hole?

Karen

This week’s anti-SOPA protests, initiated largely by the Reddit online community, illustrated the power and reach of this community and their ability to mobilise for what they consider to be a worthwhile cause.

The Reddit world is all powerful, all consuming, inspiring fierce loyalty amongst its members, driving them to higher and higher levels of comment witticisms, each time walking the razor sharp edge of being voted up or down, and the consquences for their karma on the site.

For those members of the Reddit community who actually care about such things, and it appears they are legion, having a post that makes it to the first page of Reddit.com, with hundreds (maybe thousands) of upvotes, is more exciting than a promotion at work, winning free shit, the birth of your firstborn, or pretty much any other offline event.

So for the Reddit community to suggest a blackout, was effectively them agreeing to cut off their internet hookup for 24 hours – a major sacrifice, only lessened perhaps by the fact that they knew they weren’t going to miss out on anything while the site was blacked out.

A note re Reddit sharing …

A word to the wise, for those who are not die hard Redditors but unknowingly click the “share on Reddit” button on the bottom of blog posts, thinking Reddit is just another social platform to spread your content on.

Don’t.

Unless the content you are sharing is an incendiary critique of some kind, a completely new ‘meme’ about to take flight, an image that is spectacularly good or awful for some reason, a skilled parody with great (or really really bad) production values. Just don’t.

Reddit is not a Digg substitute, just waiting to be gamed by random passers by for the purpose of SEOing links back to spam flavoured content.

Those who are successful Redditors succeed because they invest significant effort in crafting their witty, attention grabbing headlines and do their best to ensure the content they are linking to is original and of some benefit/interest to the wider Reddit community. They also regularly engage in comment threads, voting posts up and down, and consistently bring fresh content of value to the table.

Redditors are not people who happily link and retweet to any content that flashes through their Twitter feed.

Reddit is the place that pretty much every funny image, video, meme or parody your friends share on Facebook or Twitter comes from. Sometimes Redditors will have shared that content months before it gains enough viral traction to make it to your own circle of Facebook friends.

Oh and a link that makes it to the front page of Reddit? Can result in millions of hits, which is not for the fainthearted or those without a lot of bandwidth.

So if you’re up to the challenge, wearing your flame retardant knickers and are highly confident in what you have to share, by all means, take the plunge.

If not, can I suggest that you cease and desist … and all will be right in your world.

signed with caution,

Redditor’s wife