Kyle's Blog

Herding Cats - How to (Actually) Use Reddit to Get More Views

Updated Jun, 2024

Born January 1984 I’m an early millennial. As such, I have been using social media sites obsessively since I was a kid, I’ve even been wildly unsuccessful at building a few myself.

I’m not proud of the fact that for the last 10 years I’ve used Frindster, MySpace, then Digg, Facebook, moved to Reddit and now Hacker News on a daily basis. Choosing to get my dopamine fix by watching imaginary internet points increase in fits and starts rather than the typical human-to-human way.

Recently I was inspired by posts like these that claim to help you use social media sites like Reddit to increase your traffic or get more users but they are mostly bunk or common sense. Now I may be giving away the secret sauce here but I’ve benefited enough from the following tricks and am ready to move on and share what I’ve learned.

Here is ACTUALLY how to use Reddit to get more users.

I. The Landscape - People lurk

The number one thing to know is that the VAST majority of people do not interact with the sites they visit AT ALL.

Using tools like SmartLook that let me watch users on my sites in real time this was a HUGE revelation for me. Most people open the site, scroll up and down, too fast to actually read what they are looking at, then close it. At best, they will click the first most predominant link or two but that’s it. Only a TINY minority will vote and even fewer, maybe 1 in 1,000 with actually use a social media site as intended, to comment or share their own material.

The BIG lesson to learn from the way people use websites. If your content in not at the top, most people will never see it.

2: The 0.1% of users that do interact will do nothing more than upvote the already top post or comments.

Nobody comments...

People like to think of themselves as expressive but after scrutinizing 100’s of hours of user’s interactions I can tell you that most people are just going with the flow. They upvote what is already at the top. It is why, as the Reddit founders say, the hardest thing about getting Reddit right was the sorting algorithm. A simple list sorted by votes will essentially never change as the top posts just get more and more votes, most people will never see past the first 10 posts let alone the second page.

The BIG lesson to learn from the way people vote on websites. If your content in not at the top, most people will not vote for it.

Cats

3: A great mini-study done a few years ago showed the difference in posts that got 1 initial upvote compared to none.

Same content posted several days apart, the only difference was one extra initial vote. The outcome, ALL un-upvoted posts failed to get even a single one more, ~25% of those with an extra vote made the front page. I’ve gotten hundreds of posts to the front page leading to millions of page views but not a single one of those came from “organic” growth.

The BIG lesson to learn from what gets to the “front page”. If your post doesn't have any votes, most people will not vote for it.

II) Psychology:

1) Provide the right content to the right people. Confirmation bias is by far the most powerful and important psychological trick for the “grey hat” social media user. Give the people what they want and you’ll be praised as a genius but go against their interest and you will be shunned and ignored. This is why Reddit is perfect for marketers while so destructive for society as a whole. Reddit has presorted people based on their beliefs, all you have to do is cater to the lowest common denominator. Just search “reddit subreddits {your topic}” and you should find several on any given topic. Then given them what they want.

2) Don’t “self-promote”. Make sure you are posting on your friend’s behalf, a “cousin” whatever. People are viscerally attracted to people doing something for someone else and equally turned off by people working for their own betterment.

3) Add “value”. Framing is important and the best way to sell your content is that you have recently learned or discovered something that might benefit others. Again, people (and Reddit especially) hate anything that smells of self promotion so frame your content as a discovery.

III) Boosting Your Posts:
Finally, if you’ve correctly targeted your content to the right audience for nearly guaranteed success all you will need to do is kick it off with at least 5 upvotes. Here is an ideal workflow:

Option 1 is using multiple accounts. For this you will need two things, a VPN and extremely good op-sec. Reddit has gotten very good and very strict about banning accounts logged in from the same IP. A VPN will cost you at least $10 a month and if its a good one you will get a nearly infinite list of IPs to use. If you ever accidentally log into more than one account from the same IP you risk getting both accounts banned. You can spend an endless amount of time building karma and making accounts to get them all banned after a single slip up, a frustrating endeavor.

Option 2 is to pay for votes. It is safer, faster and if you have the money is by far the way to go. You will end up paying about $1 per upvote. If you want to remain anonymous for most you can pay with Bitcoin or PayPal. Here is a short list of the best ones (updated 07/24, most good sites are gone, only 2 left I know of):

BoostUpvotes.com

Soar.sh

III) Closing

Buying votes is no more unethical than paying for ads on these platforms. My take, these social media sites in and of themselves are unethical and using them to get your content out there is perfectly fair. Some people seem to think that users owe it to these sites like Facebook or Reddit to use them only as intended but that is nonsense. Reddit is abusing their users while selling them crap. They are playing with people’s emotions and it is downright disgusting what “social media” has become. Don’t fall for their non-sense and lies, most have become nothing more than advertising platforms for big business and politics and they need to die off as soon as possible. But as long as they are still around you might as well take advantage.