Sunday 2 September 2012

Redditing revealed - Iesvs the spoil-sport

In the last post I wrote about taking steps to help people to establish new blogs.  Something Surprising has now been running for a good while, with a new post every day, and with a dedicated band of regular followers whose comments and help I greatly appreciate.

One of the ways to help people to get traffic has always been to post their work to a link sharing site like Reddit, but it seems increasingly obvious that this is not worth the trouble.

It seems that /reddit/atheism, for example, is mostly followed by people who simply enjoy silly pictures or cartoons.  The evidence for this claim can be seen by visiting their site and looking at the links with the highest number of positive votes.  Almost none of them are worth the effort, and a few minutes of browsing is likely to make you feel quite cross.

On top of that, the moderators and admins seem to ban posts to Reddit for the strangest reasons.  It seems that it is bad form to post your own work for review by the rest of the Reddit community, even though (I believe) democracy was the original strategic aim of the site.  It is tempting to believe that many Reddit users are incapable of reading well reasoned articles by well established bloggers, and that although Reddit brings in a quantity of visits, it rarely brings in good quality readers who will join in the discussion.

Reddit has various cunning ways of blacklisting people and I wrote about this topic before in Why this might become a Reddit-free zone.  Finally, you will notice that the reddit boxes have all disappeared, from this blog.

The Reddit admins never have to give their reasons for their decisions and it is not overwhelmingly obvious that their actions are completely rational.  Even whole domains can banned for the most peculiar reasons, as you can read in this interesting article from Forbes.com, Reddit Reportedly Banning High-Quality Domains, exposing leaked information about reddit admins.

This domain has not yet been banned (at least at the time of writing), but frankly I won't surprised when they do ban Something Surprising for the opinions shared here.  This would be consistent, just as they banned my Reddit account for asking the following question of a redditor who has been particularly active at persecuting excellent free-thinking bloggers like Rosa Rubicondior.

So which part of this is the offence?  Is it the offence of putting the letters iesvs into a username?  I don't see why there's anything wrong with that unless you are an irrational self-centred idiot.  Or is it posting two items from the same blog?  Or is it that iesvs is a closet christian who doesn't like the views that Rosa expresses?  Or is it that /r/atheism really only likes silly pictures and not thoughtful posts?  And no I am not Rosa in another form.

Anyone even suspected of being a clone of Rosa gets immediately banned, and anyone who dares to include the characters 'iesvs' in their name gets the same treatment.

The only contributions to Reddit by a troll-like admin, Iesvs.
The only contributions to Reddit by a troll-like admin, Iesvs,
banning other users for no reason at all.

You might notice that the comment itself has been deleted from iesvs's post here where it says that there have been three comments but only two are visible.  Here's a screen shot just in case the evidence gets deleted.

Three comments?  But one is invisible. Reddit user iesvs doesn't get irony or humour!
Three comments?  But one is invisible.
So Iesvs has a great sense of humour and justice!


Besides that, if they specifically forbid people from posting their own work on the sub-reddits, why do they not simply say so and make a rule about it?

As you can see, the only contribution made by this 'iesvs' is to report other users to spammers, and since he can't cope with anyone taking the p**s I can only conclude that Iesvs is a megalomaniacal spoil-sport with no sense of humour.





4 comments:

John Chapman said...

Hmm It seems that to get anything out of Reddit you need to fill your blog with silly religious cartoons. Here's one to start you off http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/419656_313228342058313_1951364563_n.jpg

Plasma Engineer said...

I'm glad to see that the offensive bastard who was mentioned in the post appears to have noticed it and replied in a way that is true to form. :) I can't help but smile at her attempts to annoy me. I rest my case.

Anonymous said...

Eat a giant cock. You were posting from multiple accounts without even so much as a single reply to all those users who viewed your content. If you were genuinely trying to advertise your site, you would've at least TRIED to open a discussion with the community you were obviously so desperate to reach. But you didn't care; you were too busy whoring for pageviews. Your sob story is a pathetic joke just like you. You never cared about what the community thinks. You just wanted pageviews like every other failed blogger on the internet. You are a total waste of subhuman life. And just look at all those users flooding in to check out this site! AWESOME JOB. See you on reddit... oh wait, that's right: you can't post there :)

Plasma Engineer said...

Aw - poor little iesvs. As you can see, it really upsets her that I got virtually no traffic from her pathetic sub-reddit which is filled with childish cartoons. Its even more upsetting that I feel perfectly happy with the traffic that I get 'ligitimately'. The quality of my visitors beats the marginal increase in quantity any day.

Do I feel tempted to suggest that her first sentence has been over inflated? Let's just say that I've heard that it would be hardly a nibble.

And neither of my 'multiple accounts' was as sad and negative as hers. And btw - yes I can still post on reddit if I want. Poor little iesvs can't even distinguish me from RosaRubicondior, so she goes around banning everyone just in case!

QED

(I think Google will help iesvs to understand anything that is above her level of intellect.)