Reddit — how I grew to love then hate and then love it again within 24 hours

… and everything I learned along the way. Part 1 of an ongoing startup growth story

Ok, what happened on reddit

For quite a while now I’ve been working to develop the best live music discovery experience. Last Friday, I posted a discussion (http://redd.it/3263rr) on /r/music, offering an early look at shubaloo and soliciting feedback. The post reached #1 on /r/music and soon made the reddit front page with over 1000 upvotes. Not long after reaching the front page, it got up to 2850 upvotes and #11 overall and was still gaining fast. Shubaloo had gotten around 20000 unique visitors and over 110k unique page views in about 14 hours and was also picking up 3000 new visitors an hour at that point. The response was overwhelmingly positive with 94% upvotes and incredibly enthusiastic and positive comments and feedback. Out of 360 comments, only a few were negative and one of those, as it would turn out, was from a founder of a competitor.

I was ecstatic. I responded to almost every comment, discussing any and everything and upvoted tons of them, which may have led to what happened next.

My account was marked as spam, banned and my post removed.

This drove me absolutely nuts! The post was getting up upvotes so fast at that point that I was sure it was going to hit #1… then it got removed. Even more frustrating — this happened just hours before much of North America was set to wake up (4:30am PST).

I had read the reddit guidelines and did not feel like I broke any rules and frantically messaged admins but was ignored.

But enough of that. Things could have been better, but it definitely was a great experience regardless. I learned a lot through this process, and that’s what I really want to share here. The things I did right to get to the reddit front page in the first place and the things I might have done wrong.

Finding the right subreddit

You can’t get on reddit front page without enthusiasm and massive support from a reasonably large subreddit. Find the right community, first and foremost.

For me /r/music was an obvious choice. I monitored tons of random posts and comments and I was convinced that shubaloo.com can really connect with them. I knew it had a chance to take off here. It was niche enough to let my post stand out early and also large enough to propel something to the front page if everything went well.

The single best advice I’ve found about posting to reddit is to look at the most successful previous posts in a subreddit. On the top menu of any subreddit, click on the ‘top’ tab and you can see the all time most upvoted posts. On /r/music there were quite a few very successful discussions around music related tech, including a discussion around a music streaming chrome extension that a reddit user made; this was extremely relevant to me. I read a lot of these to really understand the tones and structures of successful posts here. You can also pick up lots of little unexpected tips doing this. One of the surprising things to me was that some of most successful discussion on /r/music had extremely long titles and texts. While some other subreddits might dismiss posts like these as tl;dr, longer posts seemed to drive more engagement here. I ended up writing a title that went right to the character limit and a whopper of an intro.

I created an account and started posting links and taking part in different discussions as well. Basically just to get comfortable in the community and start contributing before plugging myself.

When to post to reddit

I found a lot of articles on this subject focused on traffic analysis on reddit. I don’t really buy into that. It’s impossible to tell when your post might take off. No one would have recommended posting Friday afternoon, but I did and if the post wasn’t removed, it would have likely been near the top of /r/all as people wake up across North America the next morning which would have been perfect. Also, posting at ‘bad times’ can mean that you have less competition from other high quality posts.

So, what do I recommend? Monitor and understand your targeted subreddit!

On Fridays, /r/music is for discussions posts only. On most days, people come to /r/music to check out music and most posts are youtube or soundcloud streams. On Fridays, people come to for other kinds of discussions. This day of the week is perfect.

I was thinking of holding off on posting until my account is a little older and I’ve had more non-promotional activity (this may have helped me avoid being marked as spam), but I was very tempted to just post. Around 3pm, I saw that 3 posts on /r/music’s front page had < 3 votes and one of them was more than an hour old. Also, most other posts on the /r/music front page had a pretty small number of votes, while the top post on it had 3000+ votes.

This is exactly what you want to see. A small number of votes can get you to a visible location on /r/music while the subreddit itself has enough power to push you to the front page.

That was it, I had to post. Sure enough, 2 upvotes later, I was on the bottom of /r/music frontpage and it started steadily gaining views and upvotes.

On reddit votes and position

There are a lot of articles out there that theorizes at reddit’s algorithm for positions and discusses impact on votes and views. It’s easy to google so I’ll skip providing too much details here, but I’ll talk about some basics and some things that surprised me a little.

Basically, the position of a post depends on the post’s freshness and votes. The longer your post has existed without much votes, the harder it is to climb to a better position in order to get votes. If a post doesn’t get some votes reasonably quickly, it’s gets buried regardless of the post’s quality.

reddit.com/rules doesn’t let you let you publicly share your reddit post through other channels or directly ask for votes or incentivize votes. But they do let you share reddit links with friends. And that’s exactly what you should do the minute you post it. Depending on the subreddit, sharing it with just a small # of friends can start getting you visibility. Like I mentioned before, because the bar to make /r/music front page was so low, the post made it after just 2 upvotes from friends and it immediate started getting organic views and upvotes.

One of the things that surprised me was how much impact the # of votes and comments have on driving additional engagement as compared to your position. The post reached #3 on /r/music within an hour and then didn’t make #1 for a very long time (don’t remember when it did). Basically the post stayed in the same position for several hours while /r/music traffic was going down, yet vote rate and visitor growth kept going up. You can see my visitor graph below. Both upvote rate and site visits grew linearly and then actually started growing exponentially while the post was in the SAME POSITION! Not to mention /r/music overall traffic was going down. The only things that might have caused that were vote count and # of comments.

I don’t have much specifics on this and wished I had captured a few more stats at the time. But the high level take-away imo, is that you should keep pushing for engagement. An increased # of votes and/or comments can make it much much more likely for someone to read and upvote, like 10s or 100s of times more likely even for a post in the same position. To do that, I tried to respond to almost every comment left on the thread and I’m only guessing here, but I think it drove more people to comment.

(Almost) Final Words

That’s it. The post took off from there. And then was shut down.

I was really pissed for a while, but when I calmed down and looked back, I definitely did have a great experience overall. I recognize the need for moderation even on platforms like this and mistakes can always be made. Or I might have broken some rules without realizing and hopefully that will get cleared up later.

I still really like reddit. If you build a great product, reddit can offer a platform to connect with the communities that might find it very valuable. While it’s all but impossible to reach a wide audience through most channels without pre-existing traction or money, communities in reddit can help blow something up just for being good and valuable to them. They don’t care if no one has written about you yet and that a German shoe store comes up #1 when you google for ‘shubaloo’, they’ll check out what you’re up to and send you some love if they find it useful. As someone who is building a new tech company using just his own savings, and having started to explore marketing, I know how much outside validation is needed to break through in other channels and so I know just how valuable and important a large scale, community-driven platform like this is.

I just also want to say, the /r/music community has been nothing but wonderful and I’m blown away by the support and feedback I got and I’m extremely grateful. Also, while reddit admins have been unresponsive, the mods on /r/music have been responsive and in general done the right things throughout. If I can’t get my account unbanned, I will definitely create a new one in order to take part in the /r/music subreddit. Thanks guys and either way, I’ll talk to you soon.

Summary of lessons

• pick a subreddit whose community can connect with your product
• pick a subreddit that ideally has a low bar to make sub’s front page, but also big enough to rack up thousands of votes
• participate in the subreddit by posting and commenting (longer than I did ☺).
• read the top all time posts on your targeted subreddit and understand what made them work
• when to post? monitor and understand your targeted subreddit and reason it out
• if you get marked as a spam account, you will get banned and reddit admins will not respond to you. So take extra precaution. Reddit can do wonders for a site and is important. So, start now and get active on it.
• after posting, PM links to your friends. Try to get it visible early. You don’t need to explicitly ask for votes, just let them know you’re on there.
• engage with the community passionately in the thread, probably helps.

About this series

For quite a while now, I’ve been working to develop the best live music discovery experience. Last week, I decided shubaloo is in good enough shape to ‘launch’.

I have a lot to learn about growth and marketing. As I go, I will share my progress and the lessons I learn along the way here. This is part 1 of shubaloo’s ongoing growth story. I hope this will be helpful and/or interesting to you. Stay tuned for updates.