The power of reddit | Hacker News Reader

The power of reddit

12 pointsnergal8 comments

Yesterday I linked my new game (http://parrothunt.nergal.se) in reddit.com/r/webgames to hopefully get feedback. And just then I realized how powerful reddit is to spread your work and get feedback. It's so simple to target towards correct group of people, in this case games created for the web. Nowhere else that I'm aware of can you reach out to thousands of people around the world with the same interest that easily.

So only in 24 hours my little game has been played about 1100 times and had above 1500 unique visitors. I've gotten multiple feature requests and a lot of positive comments.

Reaching out to people interested in the same subject and get that huge response gets you motivated to continue develop what you love to do. I strongly recommend people who spend a lot of time working on small projects in their spare time to spread their work at reddit. It's not just another funny pictures site!

Thumbs up for reddit!

View on HN

Congrats. But you might want to consider the possibility of survivorship bias here. A lot of reddit posts (or HN posts for that matter) link to quality original content like yours, but never see the front page of any subreddit. And because of duplicate link penalties or prohibition, you can't try again.

Submitting to reddit/HN when you launch a product is a decision you need to be careful with. You need to time it right to get enough upvotes, you need to target your audience, you need to be ready to handle the traffic, and your product needs to be in a state that's ready for criticism.

This is an encouraging story, but to others out there: be careful! In the words of Eminem, "you only get one shot."

(Of course there are a million other ways to promote other than "Show HN" or reddit posts.)

A lot of reddit posts (or HN posts for that matter) link to quality original content like yours, but never see the front page of any subreddit. And because of duplicate link penalties or prohibition, you can't try again.

That isn't actually true for HN. As long as you're not doing it too much, you can resubmit it until it generates some discussion. But it's important that the goal isn't "to get my stuff onto the front page" but rather "my stuff is inherently interesting, so reaching the front page would be a net positive contribution to the community."

I don't know what Reddit's rules are regarding resubmits, though.

Agree, the goal is important. I actually tried before with some projects that I've might not given too much thought to it more than "I want to get a lot of users fast!" rather than "I'm proud of this project, let's hope others like it too."

This time, it was the latter, and it got a lot of more reaction than any of my other projects have ever had.

Submissions that don't gain traction can usually be resubmitted as well.

Thanks!

Yes, I agree with you. I was prepared for the traffic and also for criticism (and for the trolls out there!). But I learned that with this amount of users there will be light shed upon all small cut-corners you make that you think no one will notice. Which in my case was good for future projects.

In my case I was more eager to show the game than to actually get _a lot_ of users since there are no money involved since it's just my spare time project. However, if it had been money involved and if I had made investments (other than my own time) I probably would have investigated the best time of day/week/month to publish my project.

But I gained a lot of knowledge from this fuss :)

true but what other sites offer such a quick sanity test as reddit and HN?

Congratulations on your game's success.

I use reddit a lot to promote my blog posts but I've realized what @chatmasta mentioned to be true.

If you want to publicize your startup or project on launch day, its better to get it published on some famous blog for that stream.

Need not necessarily be techcrunch or mashable. Can also be CSS tricks or Paul Irish's blog. Equally valuable. And the HN / Reddit takes care of itself.

Sauce: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/open-source-marketing-with...

Thanks, and that was a good article (the link).

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