breakthesystem

I submitted my article, “Bridge-Building Can Ruin Your Life” to programming.reddit.com to, well, just to check out the response, because I wondered if anyone would read it.

Turns out they did indeed. After a few minutes the link was on the front page of the programming subreddit, and it rose and rose, topping out at unbe-fucking-lievable number two. My head almost split from all the grinning.

Of course I figured that after about an hour the show would be pretty much over, owing to reddit’s “hotness”-algorithm that requires more and more upvotes to keep a link on the top, the more time has passed. But again, I was pleasantly surprised.

Yes, you’re seeing correctly. After five hours I was still at number three! And not only that, but the link stayed on the front page for nearly a day, finally slipping beneath number 25 after 20-or-so hours.

So, what observations can be made?

First of all, that title is (almost) everything. On a whim, I named the reddit submission not after the article’s title, but “Reading stupid blog posts on reddit Can Ruin Your Life.” I suspect that this title is responsible for at least half the upvotes this submission got. Many people must have felt like redditor adremeaux:

I upmodded this as soon as I read the title because I thought it would be insightful and addressing the over-arching problem of crap on reddit, but instead it merely does a point-by-point analysis of a single article. Very, very uninteresting. I’m leaving my upmod though purely because of the title.

So everyone thought it was bullshit?

Well, not everyone. There was at least some interesting discussion going on in both reddit’s and this blog’s comments, which is what I was hoping for. (Well, actually I was hoping for loads of cash and hymns of praise, but diverse comments are a close third after those two.)

Some people thought the original article was crap and agreed with me, others disagreed and called the post knee-jerk reaction to a thoughtful blog entry. Interestingly enough, the author of the original post (a person still only know to me as devizen) showed up on reddit as well as here; in both places he or she seemed to dislike the attention he was getting, saying “You’re taking this all a bit too seriously, my friend.” here and agreeing with a “stop overreacting”-post on reddit.

And what is the conclusion?

You Can’t Make Everyone Happy(tm). But you can make a blog post about your experience afterwards.

Auf Twitter posten Reddit