Reddit Makeover Part 2: A 5-min Digest of Reddit’s Glossary and Culture for Publishers
This is the first step before your Reddit debut. If you go through the steps above and establish an account, you may feel overwhelmed when you see the glossary and community rules on Reddit. I will walk you through the most common ones that publishers must understand before starting to engage with Redditors.
Note: For my master’s capstone project, I worked with Barron’s editorial development, design and reporting teams and Reddit’s Media Partnerships team to help them build a presence on Reddit from scratch. I will be posting my findings and gradual steps for publishers to engage with Reddit users every week.
If you are new to Reddit, read the series step by step, as all of them are built on one another. If you haven’t read Part 1, the previous step, you should go to it first before reading further. Skipping one step will probably leave you confused when you read those after it. You can bookmark any article (if you are not logged in) or save it to your Medium account (if you are logged in) if you want to review it later. You can treat the guide as a workbook. Save it and refer back to it as you go through each of them to build a presence on Reddit.
- Upvote/Downvote: Reddit has a self-moderation system. Users can upvote posts and comments they like, and the upvoted content will rise to the top. They can also downvote content they don’t like so that it will sink to the bottom.
- Point: A result from the number of upvotes minuses the number of downvotes that a comment or post gets, also called score. Moderators may have scores of comments hidden for a while after they went alive to reduce the initial bandwagon/snowball voting.
- AMA: Also known as Ask Me Anything, AMA is an open conversation between an individual or group and your sub-Reddit’s community members.
- Karma: It reflects how much a user has contributed to the Reddit community. When users’ posts or comments get upvoted, they gain some karma. You can see how much karma every user has on their profile pages.
These are the basic terms. If you want to learn more about Reddit, feel free to bookmark Reddit 101, which we constantly checked during our collaboration.
Advice and resources for navigating through various community rules on Reddit
Reddit, once hostile to publishers, is trying to tighten its relationship with them. Since May 2016, it has allowed and encouraged publishers to source and credit Redditors in their pieces. The integration with CrowdTangle started in February 2017. CrowdTangle is an effective tool to monitor conversations on Reddit, and I will talk more about it later on. The biggest change came in December 2017, when Reddit started to roll out profile pages that let publishers post content directly to their followers.
However, the conversation-over-promotion culture on Reddit remains.
As I have explained, the persisting “1 in 10” rule means that Redditors are skeptical of sources and users who come across as too self-promotional. Publishers should never simply use Reddit as a distribution platform. Instead, the right way to jump in is to engage in conversations on topics that are relevant to their coverage.
But don’t rush to conversations yet. Study Reddit’s general guidelines for all users, known as Reddiquette.
Besides common-sense ones, such as no spams, personal attacks or copyright infringement, I copied and pasted a few rules from the list that I think publishers should always keep in mind.
- Don’t hint at asking for votes. (“Show me some love!”, “Is this front page worthy?”, “Vote This Up to Spread the Word!”, “If this makes the front page, I’ll adopt this stray cat and name it reddit”, “If this reaches 500 points, I’ll get a tattoo of the Reddit alien!”, “Upvote if you do this!”, “Why isn’t this getting more attention?”, etc.)
- Don’t send out IMs, tweets, or any other message asking people to vote for your submission — or comply when other people ask you. This will result in a ban from the admins. Your submission should get points for being good, not because the submitter is part of a voting clique.
- Don’t ask for upvotes in exchange for gifts or prizes. “Upvote me to the top and I’ll give away …”
- Don’t create mass downvote or upvote campaigns. This includes attacking a user’s profile history when they say something bad and participating in karma party threads.
- Don’t flood reddit with a lot of stories in a short span of time. By doing this you flood the new queue. Be warned, your future submissions may be automatically blocked by the spam filter. Shadow banning (you can see your posts and votes, but no one else can) can, and will, take place in more severe cases.
Unlike many other social media, publishers should refrain from passing along any comment or post to their employees for upvotes. Reddit considers this as vote cheating.
I will post advice on choosing key topics to experiment with on Reddit next week. If you have any questions or thoughts, comment under my post. I appreciate any insightful feedback, sincere appreciation and constructive criticism.
