More like Shreddit, amirite
There are a number of times in my life I’ve seen some grumpy guy go on a whole rant about how a given community is against him, or doesn’t let in new people, or shuns what’s different etc, and that’s why he’s being treated unfairly. And I’d think calm down, man, you just have to try to be part of the group instead of fighting against it. So now I think karma is starting to mold me into that guy.
My latest aggravation on that front is Reddit. I know it’s not meant to be my own personal comic advertisement machine, but hell, there are “share on Reddit” buttons everywhere on the web, and I think my comics are good, so I share them. (In fact I don’t share all of them, just the ones that I think are pretty good.) I shared Figure 4 which I thought was pretty good, and it scores 1 to 3 points depending when you load the page, which I don’t get, but it suggests around 8-ish people voted it up and 6-ish people voted it down. And I was like, man, tough crowd.
But then I posted Figure 6 a few hours ago, and so far, it’s gotten one vote. Which okay, I guess is kinda early to expect anything, but man. This amzingsuperpowers gets 28 points, and it’s an okay comic, but of course they know amazingsuperpowers so they vote it up. And I wanna complain about this Subnormality but I can’t too much, it’s pretty good. But christ 135 upvotes in the last six hours? That only happens because Reddit loves Subnormality.
But I can almost kinda get along with that—benevolence through popularity is just a human thing, fine—but then I saw Lunar Antics Comics – How Would Aliens View our Society? was linked shortly before mine, and somehow it gets five votes. Five? For that? Maybe because of the talk-to-your-kids angle, because it certainly isn’t for the comic. And it’s not even a link to the comic, it’s basically a link to the blog post advertising its sale on Amazon.
Here’s the comic they give as an example:
Seriously? Formulaic much? This is the silver medal over ventriloquist pervert pants? Just to help you out here, I’ve made the formula somewhat clearer:
Just for the heck of it, I decided to make it a better comic open to lots of interesting possibilities here. It’s not even that great of an attempt but it’s like original comic times eleventy.
Basically I gotta stop thinking of these linking things as useful and keep doing what I’m doing. Which sucks, because that was kind of my pre-hiatus plan, where “just do well” was the #1 to #3: Profit. It’s a good thing I have five months’ worth of Scribs in the wings, because if I had to draw this week’s comics, it wouldn’t happen.
February 3rd, 2010 03:13
Reddit – tough crowd indeed! The votes on there are a popularity contest and not really any indication of whether they think your comic is any good or not. I ran a Vortigaunt ‘Pr0n’ mag feature on LWL, and that got voted to about 28 and gave me an extra couple of thousand views from Reddit – the first time I’d used the site. Great! I thought! Soon as I went back to the regular story, I was lucky to ever scrape to 2! I guess Vorti-Pr0n sells copy!
It’s still worth advertising your site on there anyway – it’s free, and each link is still generally worth a couple of hundred visitors. Very few people ever actually bother to vote. :)
February 3rd, 2010 15:46
Yeah, I post on Reddit every couple of days. Once in a while I get a big boost in hits (once in a great while). The rest of the time I’ll get 20 or 30 hits. But that’s still 20 or 30 hits I wouldn’t get otherwise, so I’ll keep doing it.
Your rewrite of that stale comic was excellent. Barring copyright infringement, there might be an untapped industry for adding better dialogue to crappy comics.
February 3rd, 2010 16:21
And can someone please tell this guy that an eyeball that’s farther away isn’t bigger? I mean come on, all I draw is two circles and even I know that.