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How to use Reddit to get your first users

blog.spreadtheworld.net

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Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#121
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this analogy! I'm a moderator of r/mtb, and creators have gone as far as to ask me why people aren't interacting with their content. I usually send a short reply about how the community responds to certain types of content, but your post does a good job of explaining why . I think I'm going to borrow your bar analogy next time I have to warn a fledgling YouTuber about spamming.

r/mtb eh? My experience with forums is from running 300 cycling forums :) None of them mountain biking though.

Which 300?

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#122
post #86
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago I got banned by a moderator on a sub for answering someone's question. I did have a product but didn't pitch it directly except in paid ads on the sub. My username was the website. I emailed the mod for clarification as to what line I crossed because it seemed arbitrary. She never replied. So be careful with your metrics. What happened to me was definitely not cool. And, I quit my paid advertising ther…

I posted recently on a large subreddit to promote my app. I read the rules on the side of the page that indicated which day to self-promote and what flair to add, etc. I still got banned a few minutes later, and the post taken down. I asked the mod why and they directed me to yet another page with a huge list of rules that weren't referenced in the self-promo rules I had seen. I understood the intent and it's their r…

Would you mind sharing a URL to the "huge list of rules"?

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#124
post #71
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago I got banned by a moderator on a sub for answering someone's question. I did have a product but didn't pitch it directly except in paid ads on the sub. My username was the website. I emailed the mod for clarification as to what line I crossed because it seemed arbitrary. She never replied. So be careful with your metrics. What happened to me was definitely not cool. And, I quit my paid advertising ther…

I'm a big fan of the idea that it's ok to be a person with an account and a company, but not a company with an account. The dynamics of the latter situation feel very wrong - the goal should be to make online interactions as human as possible. Obviously I don't know the details of the situation and certainly don't know the mods reasoning, but from your description if they banned you because of your username that soun…

And for a third perspective:

I run a sub called r/ClothingStartups and the day I took it over -- it had been dead -- people began self promoting. I decided to embrace that and set rules about how often they could do that.

I made that decision in part because I was homeless for a long time and while homeless I participated a lot on Metafilter where people would squee at me for "caring" about them and giving everyone good advice for free, but no one was willing to help me solve my biggest problem which was that I needed to develop an earned income adequate to get back into housing. And they ultimately banned me for supposedly "self promoting."

People there were promoted all the time. You just had be in good with the right people and your crap could make the front page constantly.

And on r/ClothingStartups, a lot of people posting appear to be people of color and appear to be trying to start something while out of work during a pandemic. And they do all kinds of stupid, ham-handed stuff that looks really lame.

And as long as you don't have all caps in the title or violate the self promotion guidelines, I don't care.

This idea that you have to be adequately smooth in your self promotion techniques is a hardship for a lot of minorities and marginalized peoples who have no business experience, no money for ads, etc and no one will give them a break.

My sub is growing at several people a day and it has more than just self promotion, though it does have a lot of that. It also has discussion about "Where can I find a manufacturer?" and so forth -- which is exactly what it's for.

I don't know how much value it has for people to self promote there. I don't know if people are really turning that into an income. I don't have data on that.

But when I was homeless, I was surrounded by well-heeled people who were happy to benefit from my expertise for free and accuse me of "panhandling the internet" for having donation buttons on my websites. What I knew as a former mom is stuff people expect women to do for free out of the goodness of their hearts and it was an abusive expectation because they expected me to care about them but no one cared about me. No one cared that I was homeless and going hungry and was making an honest effort to figure out how to establish an earned income in spite of my medical situation.

So I think we need more spaces on the internet where they cut you some slack for being new to business and having no idea what you are doing.

Upper class people who know how to do the smooth thing and promote themselves everywhere in the socially acceptable fashion and are pro UBI are the same people that then have some problem with people doing something overly blatant like using their company name as their account name on Reddit.

It's a "Fuck you, got mine" policy masguerading as faux compassion. UBI is not about helping the poor. It's about actively treating them like parasites and actively turning them into parasites while slamming all other doors shut in their face because you can only self promote if you have a Harvard education and know how to do it the right way in accordance with the sensibilities of other Ivy Leaguers.

And that boils down to "Fuck all y'all currently poor people. We are not only pulling the rope ladder up behind us, we are burning it in front of you and pointing and laughing at your predicament."

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#125

The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out" Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on b…

I'm the sole active moderator of r/electricvehicles, and you wouldn't believe the amount of self-promotion spam that I have to deal with on that sub. It's gotten to the point that I've written a custom Python app to use the Reddit API to pull all of the analytics on any new post and present it to me in a digested form: How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits…

> manually ... releasing locks

You might like `contextlib.ExitStack` if `with lock` doesn't cut it for you.

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is just an enormous public forum of forums; there's nothing special about it. The problem with reddit isnt reddit but users who think a forum is a social life.

No, it definitely has a particular demographic skew. This is important to companies targeting a specific customer profile. Reddit is not a place I want my products associated with right now.

What do you sell, red hats?

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#127
post #12
post #11

Posting on reddit without it being deleted comes down to luck, or whether you are friends with (or have given some benefit) to the mods.

Rather depends on the subreddit. I subscribe to most of the VR subreddits. /r/vive has really strict moderation whilst /r/oculus has barely any.

> /r/vive has really strict moderation whilst /r/oculus has barely any.

Which do you think has a better community, and do you ascribe that result to the moderation?

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#128

Does anyone else have experience posting on Reddit for marketing purposes that they can share? I haven’t done it myself, but my understanding is that most subreddits frown upon self promotion posts. The article makes it sound like it’s as simple as posting to the right subreddits to get views, but I’m skeptical. The author also mentions getting 400 visitors as an example of success. 400 visitors is nice, but given th…

Do what big corporations do. Buy old accounts and astroturf. Aldi had great success posting "hauls" until they were caught astroturfing. They likely are still doing similar but smarter with their accounts.

> Aldi had great success posting "hauls" until they were caught astroturfing.

Is there a decent rundown of this anywhere? I tried a couple of google searches but didn't find much.

(I often get the feeling this is being done by various companies, especially on Reddit, but I find it hard to distinguish between astroturfing and sincere consumerism. Especially when they are probably working in combination: astroturfing to set the tone, then genuine community members jumping on the bandwagon and acting as unwitting accomplices. So I'm interested to read case studies wherever it has provably happened.)

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#129
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! You mean facebook & instagram ads or groups/regular posts?

Posts in our company's page or on our own walls gave us the best clickthrough, and we did a lot of grinding to build up our audience there. Facebook ads did well also, we would pay about 30c/click and something like 10% of those turned into sales. Instagram actually didn't do well for us - we got a higher sales capture rate but fewer clicks. We just didn't give the insta account the attention that it deserved (before…

Woo, 10% conversion rate on FBads! It's huge!

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#130

The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out" Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on b…

I thought this was a good "Ask HN" on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25118624 The OP asked about how to self promote on Reddit and there were a variety of answers (including what you said: "don't").

I missed that one! I need to hang out more here
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