I recently discovered Reddit when someone from dKos submitted one of my diaries. All of a sudden I went from 20-30 hits per day on my blog to getting over 200. So I started submitting links myself and this was the result:
See where that first link got submitted on February 3rd? Yesterday my entry about "Why the Tea Partiers will fail" almost gave me my first 1000-hit day.
So why am I writing this diary? Well, because on Reddit, the anti-liberal forces are very active and it can be hard for liberal links to get uprated enough to make the top of the "What's Hot" list. And making it to the "What's Hot" list is what drives hits to a website in the way I have been experiencing. If more Kossacks get in on the act, we can have more liberal-slanted articles getting attention and, more importantly, get more Daily Kos diaries getting attention (not to mention more traffic for the site.)
So, first of all, What the hell is Reddit?
Reddit is a link aggregator. People submit links and then people with Reddit accounts (easily and very quickly gotten) can give it an UP arrow or DOWN arrow. The more UP arrows you get, the more points it has and the higher up the lists it will climb. Getting on the What's Hot list is also a factor of how many votes it gets and it what time frame so it's much like our very own Recommended List in that way. Think of it as the Rec List for the whole danged internet!
There are various categories (called "Reddits") as well as a main Reddit.com page. Getting on the What's Hot list on the Reddit.com page will generate the most traffic but there's a huge noise factor there so competition is stiff. The Politics Reddit is also very popular and where most of the links I submit go.
Not only can you rate the links, you can also comment on them and some of the more popular Reddit entries will have hundreds of comments.
Now, How do you submit a link to Reddit?
First, you have to have an account. Signing up for one is as easy as pie and doesn't require email verification. Once you have done that, you can either submit the link manually using the "Submit a Link" button on most Reddit pages or from a button on the original website (if there is one).
Here's the page you'll land on if you do it manually:
Note the "text" tab. You can also just submit a comment (or something longer) for people to comment on. Recently someone submitted a comment that said: "Dear Reddit, I actually like Sarah Palin and will be voting for her. Here's why..." When you clicked the link it then said: "Just kidding. I don't even live in the US. She's a fucking retard." That entry has earned 10,062 up votes and 7,569 down votes for a total of almost 2,500 points!
So, you cut and paste your URL into the correct spot and pick the category. Additionally, you need to give it a good title. This is very important. Why? Because pithy titles are what get people to click through.
Note that if the link has already been submitted, you'll get a notice that it has and a link to go that entry for rating and commenting.
Another way to submit a link is to do it directly from the diary or blog entry. On my blog, I have a share button that allows folks to submit it. Each dKos diary also has a link. Here's an example:
Look at the upper right of the diary. There are four buttons there and the second one from the right is the Reddit button.
Once you have submitted it, if you go to that Reddit page and click the "What's New" tab, you should see it at the top of the page. Conveniently, gentlydownstream already submitted the Rachel Maddow diary into the Politics category and here's what the listing looks like (it's the second one down):
Now sometimes you will go to the What's New page and it won't be there. This happens regularly. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that it was caught by Reddit's very tight spam filters for some reason. There are moderators for each Reddit and you can message them with your link and ask that they let it through. You can also delete the submission by going to your own page, deleting it and then resubmitting it. Your personal page is accessed by clicking your user name at the top right of each Reddit page. Here's mine where it says eclectablog (93)
Finally, if you only submit links from one domain all the time (like if I only pimped Eclectablog blog entries), the moderators might shut you down. The idea is to make this a venue for promoting a LOT of stuff, not just YOUR stuff. So I make it a habit to submit links from different spots a few times a day as well as rating others' links and making comments from time to time. My success rate at submitting links has risen since I started doing that.
I've had luck resubmitting to a different category. Note that you can only submit links every 10-15 minutes (not sure the exact time.) If you do it too soon, you'll be told to wait.
Once the link is successfully submitted, you can watch what happens. If you go to your personal page, you'll see all the links you've submitted along with comments you've made. Here's what the link to my "Why the Tea Partiers will fail" entry looks like today:
Note that it had 29 points points when I took this screenshot. That's the number of UP votes minus the number of DOWN votes. Clicking on the "comments" link takes me to the submission's page where people can leave comments:
On the right hand side of that same page you'll see the vote tallies. Here's the one for my submission:
When I took that screenshot, it had 49 UP votes and 22 DOWN votes for a total point score of 27. An active submission can change constantly.
I highly recommend posting a link to the comments page of your Reddit submission in the Comments of the dKos diary you have submitted so that others will go there to uprate it.
That's about it. If you have other Reddit suggestions, please put them in the Comments.
Other articles about Reddit can be found HERE, HERE, and HERE.
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Finally, just for fun, here's a joke I found on Reddit yesterday (and of course nicked and blogged ;)
A huge storm hit Washington D.C. this week dropping upwards of 3 feet of snow and paralyzing the city.
President Obama announced that he wants to get the snow plowed but he wants a bipartisan consensus and compromise instead of unilateral action and that, instead of him pushing a particular bill, he wants Congress to work out the details. Republicans, seeing that Obama is for cleaning up the snow, decide that they are firmly AGAINST it and negotiate the plan down to clearing only half the snow and doing it verrr-rrry slowly. Then they refuse to vote for it anyway. Joe Lieberman and Bill Nelson express their intention to vote with the Republicans to filibuster the bill if it comes to that.
Eventually the Republicans have the bill whittled down to a ceremonial resolution expressing support for the idea of somebody plowing the snow at some point in the future. The Democrats have thrown in some tax cuts to appease them.
When the vote is taken the bill passes but only one Republican votes for it despite the Democrats' compromises. (Olympia Snowe is the only one to vote for it for obvious reasons.) Republicans attribute this to Democrats' hyper-partisanship and unwillingness to negotiate.
By this time it is late-May. All Republicans and Democrats in Congress congratulate selves for removing all the snow.
I'm just sayin'...