One of the ways to help people to get traffic has always been to post their work to a link sharing site like Reddit, but it seems increasingly obvious that this is not worth the trouble.
It seems that /reddit/atheism, for example, is mostly followed by people who simply enjoy silly pictures or cartoons. The evidence for this claim can be seen by visiting their site and looking at the links with the highest number of positive votes. Almost none of them are worth the effort, and a few minutes of browsing is likely to make you feel quite cross.
On top of that, the moderators and admins seem to ban posts to Reddit for the strangest reasons. It seems that it is bad form to post your own work for review by the rest of the Reddit community, even though (I believe) democracy was the original strategic aim of the site. It is tempting to believe that many Reddit users are incapable of reading well reasoned articles by well established bloggers, and that although Reddit brings in a quantity of visits, it rarely brings in good quality readers who will join in the discussion.
Reddit has various cunning ways of blacklisting people and I wrote about this topic before in Why this might become a Reddit-free zone. Finally, you will notice that the reddit boxes have all disappeared, from this blog.
The Reddit admins never have to give their reasons for their decisions and it is not overwhelmingly obvious that their actions are completely rational. Even whole domains can banned for the most peculiar reasons, as you can read in this interesting article from Forbes.com, Reddit Reportedly Banning High-Quality Domains, exposing leaked information about reddit admins.
This domain has not yet been banned (at least at the time of writing), but frankly I won't surprised when they do ban Something Surprising for the opinions shared here. This would be consistent, just as they banned my Reddit account for asking the following question of a redditor who has been particularly active at persecuting excellent free-thinking bloggers like Rosa Rubicondior.
So which part of this is the offence? Is it the offence of putting the letters iesvs into a username? I don't see why there's anything wrong with that unless you are an irrational self-centred idiot. Or is it posting two items from the same blog? Or is it that iesvs is a closet christian who doesn't like the views that Rosa expresses? Or is it that /r/atheism really only likes silly pictures and not thoughtful posts? And no I am not Rosa in another form.
Anyone even suspected of being a clone of Rosa gets immediately banned, and anyone who dares to include the characters 'iesvs' in their name gets the same treatment.
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| The only contributions to Reddit by a troll-like admin, Iesvs, banning other users for no reason at all. |
You might notice that the comment itself has been deleted from iesvs's post here where it says that there have been three comments but only two are visible. Here's a screen shot just in case the evidence gets deleted.
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| Three comments? But one is invisible. So Iesvs has a great sense of humour and justice! |
Besides that, if they specifically forbid people from posting their own work on the sub-reddits, why do they not simply say so and make a rule about it?
As you can see, the only contribution made by this 'iesvs' is to report other users to spammers, and since he can't cope with anyone taking the p**s I can only conclude that Iesvs is a megalomaniacal spoil-sport with no sense of humour.
