my Reddit promotional drill

[bvanevery]

Every so often I remember I have a Reddit account.  I show up, I go to /4/4Xgaming and read new posts.  There's always someone looking for a new game recommendation, and there's always someone complaining about one of the current most popular titles.  If I have a hand-wavy excuse to be topical, I make a pitch for SMAC and for this site, providing a link.  Sometimes I don't even have to hand-wave: someone wanted a game that would deal with the politics of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, for instance.  UN Council, check!  Atrocity prohibitions lifted.  Talk about fielding an easy one.

My reason for occasionally showing up, is to see if any stimulating discussion relevant to 4X TBS game design has arisen.  That's mainly why I go through a round of Reddit.  Not enough comes up to keep me on a steady diet there, which is why I fall asleep for a few weeks.  Including /r/gamedesign.

[Syn]

Keep in mind that if the only site you link to on reddit is AC2, reddit will eventually shadow-ban you and make your posts invisible to others.

[Buster's Uncle]

You get another fifty thumbs-up post for doing that, though...

                       

                       

                       

                       

                       

                       

                       


 

[bvanevery]

Keep in mind that if the only site you link to on reddit is AC2, reddit will eventually shadow-ban you and make your posts invisible to others.

Ouch, that's really evil.  What's the threshold?  I can think of vast segments of legitimate discourse that would be crushed by that.

[Syn]

I'm not entirely sure what it is now. When I still had a blog and did advertising, 80/20 was a good threshold. '20' being what you're actually trying to advertise. It's to prevent spamming and encourage contribution.

BU ranted about this stuff in another thread recently...

[bvanevery]

So if my "contributing posts" are paragraphs long, but I happen to keep linking to only 1 site, which might be my personal website for all they know, I get shadow banned?  Absent other metrics, such a policy would be perverse in the extreme.  I would hope they'd rely somewhat on responses and downvoting to make an algorithmic decision on that.  Otherwise it would smell very much like "we want all traffic staying with us."  Which is evil.

Well I read up on the issue a little bit.  Also the "karma" metric.  Seems I have 1,462 karma.  I wonder if that factors in?

When reading the Reddit FAQ, perusing the acronym section, I had the unfortunate realization that "I Am Not A Lawyer" has an interpretation I never thought of before.

[Syn]

Reddit is a community site. They don't want people swooping in to shill their websites and then swoop out. They want people to contribute to the community. Advertising your own site (or a site on someone else's behalf) to excess is frowned upon and gets dinged because it demonstrates that you're not there to be a part of the community but instead only there to funnel traffic elsewhere.

It's very easy to navigate around, though. For every link to a certain domain, try to link to 3-4 others. Not in the same post but throughout your activity in general.

[bvanevery]

Yeah yeah but you can legitimately contribute to a community without being around there all the time, and plugging your own "preferred" site every time you do show up.  I have as much game design thought pouring out of my little finger as some people have out of... I won't stretch the metaphor.  The important point is that I don't continuously stick around because my words are often better than someone else's words and after not too long, people bore me.  I'm sure that tastes vary.  If I had found the ideal game design website I'd be there a lot more often.

[Green1]

Yeah yeah but you can legitimately contribute to a community without being around there all the time, and plugging your own "preferred" site every time you do show up.  I have as much game design thought pouring out of my little finger as some people have out of... I won't stretch the metaphor.  The important point is that I don't continuously stick around because my words are often better than someone else's words and after not too long, people bore me.  I'm sure that tastes vary.  If I had found the ideal game design website I'd be there a lot more often.

Depends on the community.

Some communities on reddit do not mind, as long as it is quality stuff. Others don't want you doing ANY kind of linking off their little place. There are also a few places that are all about that person's content.

But you are correct. In general, they want you to post as a newbie. But, once you establish yourself, they are much more lenient. Which, unfortunately involves time.

[bvanevery]

Not like I'm a spring chicken over there.  My 0th cake day was in 2010.  Anyways AFAICT, people still reply to my posts, so I am not shadow banned.  I did recently learn about a forum where you can check, but I'm not going to bother because there's no evidence I have been banned.  I'd like to think their algorithms and admins aren't completely stupid.

Reddit just has too may people talking each other.  I can't recognize anyone as a "regular" in /r/gamedesign, not like back in Usenet days where there were clear dominant personalities.  There's a slight possibility that I just talked more back then, so was more aware of people who also talked a whole pile.  But when people do reply to my posts, I often don't find much reason to keep the ping-pong going.  That could be lack of design insight in the community, or it could be that Reddit's "bury the content past a certain number of followups" dynamic, is curtailing the thoughts that would otherwise occur to deep thinkers.  Usenet had posts that would go on forever about some subject, although topic drift was of course a problem in such cases too.

Maybe it's the influence of a world of Twitter-heads and the ubiquity of the TL;DR meme.  I usually dont want a TL;DR as I know how to skim things just fine.  Heck I got a college degree having to get through painful books.  What I usually want is a TL;DW for videos.  Not gonna sit still for someone's 10 minute forced presentation.

[Green1]

Yeah.

I think there is a sweet spot as far as forums and reddits.

Too big, any post you make - even if it is a great one, gets lost 5 pages down in a matter of hours. It's really hard to be relevant.

Too small, no one goes there. You post what you want but it will never be seen.