Redditors Anonymous

After trolling on Reddit for a year, I finally signed up. (My user name is aboothe726, look me up and say “Hi.”) I’ve submitted my first link and it did really well. I think I’m addicted.

One of the reasons I waited so long to join was that I just didn’t think I had anything to add the Reddit community. When I was on Reddit this morning, though, I saw a story about Linux filesystem defragmentation with results that are really misleading and no one seemed to be talking about the right way to interpret the data, so I was inspired to start commenting. I was very encouraged when people responded positively to what I had to say.

Reddit ranks submitted “links” by allowing users to vote links “up” or “down.” A link’s net score is “up-down,” and that’s what shows up in the UI as the link’s “points” score. Reddit also allows users to comment on the submitted links, and uses the same scheme to rank comments. After poking around for a while, I discovered that you can see the number of up and down votes as well as the net score for links, but you can only see the net score for comments. I think this is a bug, so I submitted a “Dear Reddit” link asking them to fix it.

Now I can’t stop checking how many points my links and comments have! And I’ve got 8 points of karma! I read the FAQ and there’s nothing you can do with karma whatsoever, but I can’t stop watching it, either!

As a joke, I thought about registering redditorsanonymous.com, but it’s already been taken. However, redditorsanonymous.org is free…

UPDATE: Yoink! I just registered redditorsanonymous.org. Nothing there yet, but keep watching…

UPDATE: Ha! My “show up and down votes on comments” link just hit the front page! Oh god, I can’t stop clicking. And I have 22 karma now :D

UPDATE: Riding high at #2. There’s an article about Fox News’ discussion of an Obama assassination at #1, so I can’t see my post getting all the way to the top. (Obama and Fox News on reddit? That’ll be at #1 forever.) I’ve learned some interesting things by watching the article move up the chain. I’ll write a post on that later. Also, karma now at 37. I really don’t know why I care, but I do :D