

The power of reddit - nergal

Yesterday I linked my new game (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;parrothunt.nergal.se) in reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;webgames to hopefully get feedback. And just then I realized how powerful reddit is to spread your work and get feedback. It&#x27;s so simple to target towards correct group of people, in this case games created for the web. Nowhere else that I&#x27;m aware of can you reach out to thousands of people around the world with the same interest that easily.<p>So only in 24 hours my little game has been played about 1100 times and had above 1500 unique visitors. I&#x27;ve gotten multiple feature requests and a lot of positive comments.<p>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&#x27;s not just another funny pictures site!<p>Thumbs up for reddit!
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chatmasta
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.)

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sillysaurus3
_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.

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nergal
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.

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rvinay88
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...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/open-source-marketing-with-
velocityjs/)

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

