For those who are unfamiliar with Reddit, it is a very
interactive and passionate group of tech savvy individuals who enjoy providing
advice, receiving information and learning about new things through the
platform. It works by providing “subreddits” for various topics, and for us
these included “reddit/worldnews”, “reddit/AskReddit” and “reddit/news”. An article from website Urlesque provides an
example, “Subreddits
allow you to follow very specific areas of interest. There's a subreddit for New
York City where people talk about best places to find Pho
or why the F train is down.”[1] The platform is
very simple and only requires a login which one of our team members already
had. There are no options for posting photos, but you are able to link your
post to a page. We planned on linking it to the Bit.ly but Reddit does not
allow those links because of their high potential for spamming, so we were
required to use the long, and not so pretty, Brightidea link to our project.
We
learned quite a bit through our experience with Reddit. I have used the
platform many times for student work, for example, quick Qualtrics surveys, and
have had a lot of success but it seems to be the higher level of involvement
required for this project upset the Reddit community. While we did receive 34
comments and multiple clicks, proving that our tagline and topic raised
awareness, the comments were mostly inappropriate, rude or unhelpful. As explained in “How to Use Reddit”, “The Reddit
culture is challenging if you don’t have a thick skin or you have a low
tolerance for profanity and misogyny.”[2] Again, I think this is attributed to
the fact that this community is very surface level feedback and quick,
passionate answers. If our topics and call to action were simpler and there was
a subreddit for “Disasters” there would have been increased success. Finally,
we ran into a timing issue between posts. The legitimacy of your posts is based
on past behavior on Reddit and although I had past behavior it wasn’t enough to
allow me to make posts more often than every 8 minutes. Our top reference
article explains, “Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if
that’s all you ever post, and it always seems to get voted down, take a good
hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely-used
rule-of-thumb is the 10:1 ratio, i.e. only 10% of your submissions should be
your own content.”[3]
There
are some things that could’ve potentially increased our success level within
Reddit, including adding legitimacy to our posts. Because of the fact that we
were unable to list the company (Xerox) made us appear more “spam-like” and
therefore did not attract valuable participants. In addition, we needed an
account with more content-related behavior and not just requests for help. Through
our research we also have now realized that you can create a subreddit
yourself, so we may have more successful by creating “reddit/disasterrelief”
via one of our personal accounts.[4]
In conclusion, we should’ve read this entire article before starting and could
have possibly NOT have used it in the first place!
I definitely laughed when I saw this (sorry.) Reddit is a fun and useful tool, but as you found out can be very tricky and discouraging. I tried to find your post, but I assume you deleted it. I did see that in your previous posts you had good responses from surveys on your gluten stuff. I don't think reddit is a bad tool to leverage for open innovation, in some cases it might be the best. It already acts as a sort of innovation tool, where posts are voted on and added to. The key is knowing the demographic you are targeting. I think even with Xerox you would have gotten poor response. Perhaps if you had a bigger monetary prize it would have helped, but overall I think challenges like this that aren't particularly engaging to the masses (or reddit community) come off as spam. The key is community, and unless you are active in the community it will be seen as this, unless it is targeting a specific group or has rewards (such as your successful one.)
ReplyDeleteNow this was fun to read.. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteGoing on a tangent -
I have personally not used reddit much but it had been in the news during the Boston marathon crisis. One could find almost anything they wanted to know about the bombings. Then a group of people decided to use it to find the bombers by crowd-sourcing...and things went wrong. See more here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2418004,00.asp
This brings two questions/comments:
1) Is reddit better for crowdsourcing 'during a crisis' rather than 'regarding a crisis'?
2) When people are in panic mode, they will believe anything. How can reddit change such that these risks can be avoided?
This is really interesting! I wonder if it would have helped if you found an existing user to help you post it. Maybe reach out to people who are extremely active in the Reddit community. Targeted personalized messages to these people might be better received. It's always harder to turn down a direct request. Then if they make the post, it gives the entire project a higher level of credibility with this community.
ReplyDelete