25 September, 2020

Thirteen Years on Reddit

Ace cake by MJ Buell.

Today is my cake day. I joined reddit 13 years ago, only a few months after Conde Nast bought it from the original founders.

At the time, I was a webmaster and I joined reddit because I wanted to experiment with how marketing on reddit affected web traffic. I wrote a couple of trash articles that I knew would not be popular on my own and then posted links to them on reddit using a few different accounts. In one, I just posted a link that copied the bland title. In another, I posted the link alongside a catchy title. In the last, I posted the link with a fake (but catchy) title that had nothing to do with the blogpost. As you might expect, the second approach worked best, and I used this completely nonscientific experiment as the basis for chapter 4 in an ebook I wrote back then about Email & Social Marketing.

Although my purpose for joining reddit ended after only a month, I stayed and became a regular redditor, like everyone else. I only ever upvoted the stuff I really liked, so it’s been interesting going back in my own history to see what I liked throughout the years. I feel like I’ve changed as a person so very much in the past 13 years.

Thirteen years ago is a long time ago. 2007 was the year that the iPhone was introduced. Nancy Pelosi became the first female speaker of the house that year. Tumblr was launched. Mauritania became the last country on earth to officially criminalize slavery. Words like “hashtag”, “netbook”, “retweet”, “Latinx”, “coworking”, “crowdfunding”, and “colony collapse disorder” were added to the dictionary. Trump was on Wrestlemania.

Thirteen years is a long time to be doing anything. When I was 13, my first sister was born. For a long time afterward I still considered myself basically an only child because I never had a sibling my age. The group I most identify with, Effective Altruism, is not yet even 13 years old. Thirteen years is longer than most people spend in primary education. I’ve been on reddit for a very long time.

And yet, in all these thirteen years, this is the first time I’ve remembered to post on my cake day.

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