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!
