Reddit & Readership
It is a universal truth: all bloggers are readership whores. We exist to get our blogs noticed and read by as many people as possible. I currently have several ways of spreading my articles on the internet, mostly through use of Digg, The Atheist Spot, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. I previously played about with StumbleUpon but found that submitting stuff is limited. If you don’t submit stuff from different websites, you get blocked out by the submission system until you do. For bloggers, this is useless.
Reddit is the next best thing as I have recently learned. I used to submit stuff to the general reddit website, and I got a few hits here are there. My reddit “karma” didn’t really go anywhere. A few days ago db0 published an article about increasing your readership (see what I mean? READERSHIP WHORES!!!) using the subreddit: atheism. Not being a regular reddit user, I had no idea what a subreddit was.
I do now. A subreddit is essentially a custom reddit based on a particular subject. The idea being that instead of submitting an article about star wars to the general reddit site, you can submit it to the subreddit “starwars” instead. People can subscribe to that subreddit, choosing only to get articles about Star Wars. Pretty neat. The “atheism” subreddit was created 7 months ago and has over 15,000 subscribers. THAT IS A LOT.
So I began submitting my articles to the atheism subreddit. My karma has almost tripled in the last 24 hours and is continually growing. My articles have been rated up more times than any of the ones I had previously submitted to the general reddit. To do a test, I submitted one of my first articles which was one of my most popular; the 101 Atheist Quotes one. In the last hour it has had a massive amount of hits, and it made me want to resubmit all of my previous articles. I’m not that much of a whore though.
What is great about the subreddit is that you can subscribe to its RSS feed and get a constantly updated list of new submissions. Of course, you get absolutely everything so that might pose a problem for amateur RSS users. Others (like myself) have RSS feeds set up in such a way that if I don’t check it every day I find myself with over 3000 unread articles. However this really isn’t advisable unless you spend more than 50% of the day on your computer.
So, to sum up:
The atheism subreddit is AWESOME. The Atheist Spot is equally awesome because it is dedicated totally to atheism and the developers are great guys who like to keep readership whores like myself well fed. Join both, submit to both, spread the word.
Contact Adrian Hayter
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I agree. Reddit is now my #1 referrer by a huge margin. I like the Atheist Spot, but there is not anywhere near the number of people on that site. For every one or two click from Atheist Spot I can get 50 or 100 from Reddit. Having said that, I still hope that Atheist Spot becomes more popular.
I’m giving it a whirl, but the bad part is that you can only submit a single story once every 10 minutes. That’s fine if you’re submitting stories as you write them, but if you’re trying to add several from your archives (like me) it’s going to take a while.
I also wish I could just set up Reddit to automatically add my newest stories.
I’m glad I raised the awareness a bit. If you found it as interesting as I did you can also check the follow up article ;)
Bevans, I wouldn’t suggest you submit all your articles in one go as this will only annoy people and get you downmodded. I suggest submitting each article in a space of 5-6 hour at least.
Adrian, what is your username there?
I’m glad I raised the awareness a bit. If you found it as interesting as I did you can also check the follow up article ;)
Bevans, I wouldn’t suggest you submit all your articles in one go as this will only annoy people and get you downmodded. I suggest submitting each article in a space of 5-6 hour at least.
As some of you probably already realized, when a rather old article on this site hit reddit front page int also invariably hit digg front page, and the server requests went through the roof. PHP chewing every last memory in an attempt to run all the PHP scripts that power this site and pulling the whole server down…
May digg be blessed for the living hell it causes to server admins…
Ah, the dream of getting killed by Digg…
Congratulations!
I got nice uppage on a picture of Richard Dawkins I submitted (what a great smile he has), and I just submitted Richard Dawkins Facts. :)
Well-explained!
I also like how much comparatively quicker it is to submit to Reddit; Digg’s submission process takes too long, not just because of additional things to fill out, but the dupe-checker should come near the *beginning*.
Hi!
Glad to see you gave up on splogging StumbleUpon.
Thanks by the way.
I was kicked off StumbleUpon because I was sick and tired of y’all blogger and sploggers submitting every goddamned article you write.
So when I’d find an account like yours (you sound like a classic SU splogger), I’d write a scathing review of the splogger (with plenty of profanity), and then thumb down their every single submission to SU, and comment that it was submitted by the author.
The reason it “didn’t work” for you is because a lot of volunteers like me spend an awful amount of time weeding out all the crap authors, bloggers, spammers and sploggers submit.
StumbleUpon is about people with similar interests recommending, sorting and weeding out sites.
It is NOT a marketing tool for cheapskate “authors”.
So please, stay away from StumbleUpon.
Cheapskate splogger…
ThungurKnifur,
The point of StumbleUpon is to share interesting articles. If I write an article and want to share it, that is my right. People can easily rank it down if they do not like it, but that never happened.
It is people like you that give StumbleUpon a bad view by bloggers. Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, etc do not have such authoritarian members and they value any content submitted.
Oh, and interestingly enough this article was put on StumbleUpon by another person…lol
I’m glad “people like me” gives you sploggers a “bad view” of StumbleUpon (is that even correct use of English?), that makes it all the more likely that you will stay the FUCK away!
And no Adrian, it is not your fucking right to submit your own stuff to StumbleUpon.
I know all you splogger c*nts think you have some godgiven (LOL) right to force your content upon hapless SU users, but that is a misconception on your behalf.
If you took the time to read the StumbleUpon TOS (terms of service) at http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms/ , Section 2, 1.4 (Restrictions) you will find that you are considered a spammer according to SU’s rules.
Now you have to understand that SU is a LOT different from Digg or Reddit.
The biggest difference is that you have NO WAY of previewing what you stumble.
You press the Stumble button and pray that it is a quality link, submitted by someone with similar interests. and not some rip off page from some sploggers hellhole submitted by said splogger.
On Digg and Reddit you actually choose what articles you read, with StumbleUpon you get it shoved down your fucking troat.
And that is why you will run into people like me, calling you a splogger c*nt at every chance we get.
Cheers!
BTW, these word makes you look a LOT like a spammer!:
“If you don’t submit stuff from different websites, you get blocked out by the submission system until you do. For bloggers, this is useless.”
Just replace “bloggers” with “spammers”.
I understand you don’t have any precious time to sumbit anything that contributes to the StumbleUpon database, but just abuse it to further your own website traffic.
Since you seem to know you have a right to submit your own site to StumbelUpon, you wouldn’t mind giving me the name of your StumbleUpon account?
I mean if you KNOW you can submit your stuff, you have nothing to fear from me reporting you to the StumbleUpon staff, right?
Looking forward to your reply!
Cheers
Thungur
A blog is neither a product nor a service. When I contacted StumbleUpon to ask them about submitting stuff they replied that I could do so but that software limitations meant that my submissions would only be accepted if I had stumbled other sites as well.
I now happily submit both other sites and my own to StumbleUpon.
@ThungurKnifur If Adrian is such a spammer, it wouldn’t be difficult to figure out who he is in SU from seeing who submitted most articles from here would it?
In any case, you don’t have to do the SU morality police and you’re barking at the wrong tree. Most bloggers go through this stage of not really knowing how to us SU correctly. As a result, we get diminishing returns automatically without needing you to come to our comments and play holier-than-thou.
Adrian wrote:”A blog is neither a product nor a service. ”
Then what the hell is it?
I’m saddened to hear that the SU staff have sold out completely and are allowing you splogger SoB’s to keep diluting the content.
I knew things were going down the drain when they sold out to the E-bay whores.
Don’t you get the difference between a submission based on quality and one based on your need for money/fame/whateverthehellitisyouwant???
Of course every blogger (and their granny) will submit every single post on every single splog they run, especially if they make a penny for every sucker that stumbles across it.
That doesn’t mean that it’s worth reading or spreading, and I think it ought to be up to the READERS and not to the AUTHORS to judge if it is indeed worth anyone elses precious time.
Don’t you?
@db0:
Why the hell should I waste my precious time doing detective work (the kind that has already gotten me banned from StumbleUpon) when Adrian can just give it to me.
He has stated that he has indeed contacted SU staff for approval of his submission, so what does he have to fear from handing it to me?
Maybe not so sure about his “right” to submit his own articles?
Come on Adrian, it’s time to show your convictions, give me your SU handle!
Or else we KNOW you’re just another greedy little “readership whore” who tries to pull a fast one and get away with it.
Cheers!
So let me get this straight, your little attempt at vigilantism (I guess by using scripts to scrape SU and triangulate whom you call “sploggers” and then annoy them) backfired and now you have the gall to accuse others of abusing SU TOS?
You were banned for fuck’s sake!
Let me say it again, SU has automatic mechanism to punish sploggers. You vigilantism is not necessary or warranted. You’re not the one to judge what is quality or not. If the SU users don’t like a page, they don’t thumb it up and then it’s gone after 100 hits or so. If the same domain keeps getting submitted and never voted up, new hits are stopped from being sent.
So yeah, it IS the READERS who judge ultimately but unless one has READERS outside SU, then if the AUTHOR does not submit something, noone will.
A hobby, a place for me to write without being censored. If people like what I write, they can subscribe. What I do is free, they have no power over anything on the blog, and they are not paying me any money to read it. It is neither a service nor a product.
I do indeed get the difference. However, the SU system is hardly one that simply throws random pages at people. In fact, a page is chosen based on your preferences, if you friends voted it up, and on the “rank” of the page itself. Thumbed down pages on SU do not get shown often.
It seems strange then, that every single page I have submitted to SU has got a large number of votes. Evidently people like my content, and it is not “spam”.
@db0:
No, I don’t use any fucking scripts, it was all manual labor.
I usually stumbled across some shoddy post and looked at who submitted it, checked that persons SU profile to check if they submitted more from the same shoddy site.
And usually they did.
And no, my ToS violations didn’t “backfire”, I knew all along that I could get banned at any time.
But I thought it would be worth it, if just SU would take notice of the VAST amounts of splogs and blogs that get submitted by the author and then thumbed up by his cronies (and shadow accounts).
Let me tell you about SU mechanism for weeding out splogs:
IT DOESN’T FUCKING WORK AT ALL!
Simply because SEO’s, spammers and sploggers use shadow accounts (accounts created to boost the original submission), SU exchange (trading thumbs up amongst themselves) and the fact that Barry Conway (the guy supposedly in charge of ToS violations) seem to be bribed by the SEÒ mafia (he only bans us who use profanities against spammers, NOT the spammers themselves).
And yes I was kicked out from SU because i violated the ToS (and that’s OK), but why are the spammer cunts who I so vehemently opposed still there?
What is the greater violation, sumbitting junk which wastes hundreds (if not thousands) of peoples precious time, or calling the bastard who keeps submitting the shit a spammer cunt?
I can figure what your answer’s gonna be, but I sure as hell don’t agree.
Your last sentence makes no sense, feel free to enlighten me:
“but unless one has READERS outside SU, then if the AUTHOR does not submit something, noone will.”
***********************************
@Adrian:
I really don’t give a shit if your articles were popular on SU.
The reason I wrote the first post was because I saw you blatantly admit to gaming the SU system, and even have the gall to bitch about how it didn’t work.
I absolutely loathe people like you, who view StumbleUpon as just another propagation site for you to use on your way to blogosphere stardom (hahahaha!).
And since SU has deprived me of any means to criticize you there, I go straight to the root of the problem, ie. YOU!
I understand you have some uncontrollable need for approval, and that this site is your only way to try to get that.
I really believe that you bloggers are the scum of the earth, you have absolutely NOTHING new to say, just keep rehashing the same old tired arguments/stories/rumors/facts that have already been argued/told/spread/proved a million fucking times before.
But your egos don’t give a fuck about that, the important thing is the YOU have YOUR share of fame (muahahaha!) and get to state YOUR opinion, fuck anyone who objects.
And I think that people like you should go fuck yourselves, all you “readership whores” (your words, not mine….lol).
And that’s my $0.02
Cheers!
Thungur
You are insane. I have already told you how submitting your own content is not against the ToS, and SU have approved my use of it, provided I submit other sites along with my own.
So for you to go on and on about how I somehow broke the ToS and how every blogger should be banned is ridiculous. Your constant rating down of people’s sites is nothing short of trolling, which thankfully SU don’t like either.
For some reason you think you can run SU better than the people who already do it, and have set out to rewrite the rules so that you can get rid of the people who you seem to hate. SU is a place to share websites. If people don’t like the website, they rate it down, simple as that.
I may be insane, but you still haven’t divulged your SU handle, and yet you claim that “SU have approved” you submitting your own site.
I think you’re full of shit mate.
And I think the reason you wont give me your nick is that you know that what you do is despised and frankly hated on StumbleUpon, but you want the traffic anyways and try to stay under the radar of the SU spam patrol (and I’m not talking about the grossly incompetent staff).
And I’m not rewriting the rules, it’s just that lazy fuck Barry Conway who either doesn’t give a shit or is paid to keep the spammers safe and silence the opposing voices.
So are you gonna give me your handle, or will I have to create a SU account JUST to check out who submitted your splog the most?
If no, then you’re not only a splogger cunt, you are also a chickenshit little fucking pussy too.
Come on, if you REALLY believe the bullshit you’re feeding me you’ve got nothing to loose…
You claim that the SU staff approved your submissions and the SU users liked it, so what’s keeping you?
Huh?
Cheers!
Thungur
I haven’t divulged my SU handle because I have deduced from your rantings here that the first thing you would do would be to rally your “anti-blogger” buddies and rate down all my submissions.
As pointed out to you before, you can easily figure out which is my handle for yourself. I’m not inviting an attack though. I’m not that stupid.
You seem to spend a lot of time messing up SU’s ranking system by ranking down sites purely on the basis that “the guy who wrote this submitted it”, so why can’t you spend the same time simply figuring out my username?
So yes, I do have something to lose. If I gave you my handle and you reported me to SU, they wouldn’t care, because I haven’t broken their policy . What would happen would be that all my submissions would be ranked down by an army of idiots who think they can rule SU as a vigilante mob.
I personally think you are just trying to get my handle so you can get your cronies to rate my user page down, send me spam hate messages, and generally be an annoyance. I promise you, when that happens I will contact the proper authority at SU and get you dealt with.
You chickenshit splogger bastard!
Taking away my comments, eh?
I understand that you made a total fool of yourself when you threatened to report my banned account to SU staff for ToS violations, but censoring my response to your silliness?
That´s very “authoritarian” of you.
Well fuck you too!
Unsincerely with no respect
ThungurKnifur
I have done no such thing. I wouldn’t remove comments that myself and other people found hilarious and amusing. Your comments are all there, so please stop being an annoyance and go away.
Indeed, and your ridiculous and pitiful attempt to make Adrian look bad by saying he’s deleting your comments makes it all the more funny.
As admin and owner of this site it is Adrian’s right to delete comments and even ban if he feels like it (and as server admin I get same rights across several sites hosted of the server).
Now very rarely does either of use do either, in fact I don’t think we ever have.
As for SU, they have there own protection system, there own admin’s and it is there job to give warnings and ban accounts as they wish. Stop trying to do it for them.