Creating Subreddits for Fun and View Traffic

Despite what reddit pitches to its user base, it's no secret that reddit is frequently used by social media marketers. This write up from The Daily Dot talks about the case of Ian Miles Chiang (a moderator for many communities such as r/WTF,  r/Politics and r/AskReddit) who was was hired by the GlobalPost to promote their articles in the reddits he administrated.

One of the comments left on the Daily Dot article

What I find interesting is that some users claim Ian often used his mod status to delete and ban other users who competed for views with him.


Sadly this kind of admin abuse is not uncommon and has been reported by other sites as well. Even I have written prior articles about how subreddit mods have blasted my submissions even though the content submitted was appropriate for the topic of the community.

The only way to not deal with moderators who want to compete with their subscribers for views is to create and grow your own subreddit communities. This is the tactic I'm now taking. The thing is, it can be difficult to stand out from the legions of other subreddit communities that already exist for every conceivable topic under the sun.

So what I've done is try an experiment; I created a subreddit for users of my website to share news, videos and other kinds of links relevant to all things RPG. I also made it clear the community was associated to my site, so there can be no accusations of "spamming" or misleading users.



Another thing I did to differentiate my community from other subreddits about RPGs is let people know they won't be banned for self-promotion. Nearly all subreddits have mods looking for any excuse to use their mod powers, so my belief is that by allowing people to self-promote we can find a niche.

I also encourage my users to submit links, because I will be using the community to find news about games to promote on my RPG Fanatic Facebook Fan page. So if they submit one of their own high-quality articles it might receive a personal plug from me.

The benefits to creating my own subreddits are simple to understand:

• Nobody will be deleting my links anymore.

• Because my links aren't getting deleted, I'll be able to gain more link karma as people upvote my comments and links.

• I can include links to the sidebar of the community to things I want to promote, including other communities.

I'm planning to start more subreddits but at the moment I haven't quite nailed down how best to promote a new subreddit. I shall have to write about that in a future article.

Update: I've taken over moderation of an existing the sub reddit,

http://www.reddit.com/r/YouTubeGamers/

We'll see how this experiment goes.