I liked what the author posted in the comments section:

Sigh. My silly rant about ponies gets to #1 on Hacker news, while my serious, carefully researched 3000-word post on host-proof hosting languishes in obscurity. Oh, the humanity. ;)

Another way to stop your post from appearing on Reddit is to make it 3000 words long. ;)

Conversely, a way to ensure that it does appear on Reddit is to include several pictures (or videos) of kittehs.

Or a pony, lying on its back.

I tend to up-vote any ponies capable of pantomime.

This highlights a more general problem: aggregation sites have algorithmic ways to bring content which is both "new" and "popular" to the forefront, while keeping spam and lame content off of the main page, and these algorithms can sometimes be hacked or gamed.

One political blog I read was often reposted to reddit and similar sites by its detractors, who would mis-title the posts in offensive ways and therefore get them buried. This is more or less the problem described here -- by submitting the post with a title that gets either automatically blocked or ignored/downvoted by the community, one can easily bury posts that might otherwise garner a fair bit of traffic.

Once it becomes common to game any particular aggregator, it becomes less trustworthy and therefore less useful as a filter. (IMO, HN's policy of not editorializing post titles is a good way to prevent this particular form of abuse.)

> One political blog I read was often reposted to reddit and similar sites by its detractors, who would mis-title the posts in offensive ways and therefore get them buried.

On a tangent, but the link title alteration (not necessarily maliciously though) was one of the main reasons I stopped visiting reddit as much as I used to. It got to the point where I'd open links in tabs, and just minutes later wonder if I'd clicked on the wrong ones.

easy...just submit a post without having a bunch of your friends upvote it....guaranteed to be dead on arrival

I know that reddit isn't exactly the most popular thing on HN, but in the past I have gotten a few articles on the frontpage without asking anyone to vote on them. This was a while ago (maybe a year now), but I think reddit's submission process has a while to go before it reaches something like Digg.

If you wait until you're number one on HN and then add a reddit flair to the bottom of the post then it's pretty easy to get enough reddit upvotes to make the front page without asking any of your friends to vote for you. If this doesn't work then just submit to one of the default subreddits, and you'll still make the front page. The only problem is that it'll take a few hours for this to happen so you can't really get above #15 or so, but that's still good for a couple thousand page views.

> but that's still good for a couple thousand page views.

Reddit has become that big? No wonder nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

subreddits are excellent.

Some of the subreddits are very reasonable, actually! I have had good luck submitting articles to Proggit without external support. When my submissions slip through the cracks, I can usually find fault with my approach: either the timing or the title was awful.

There ARE bots that seemingly downmod everything in the 'New' queue, but Reddit's system is designed to keep nascent articles alive longer, so they don't have much overall effect.

I've submitted maybe 20 things to reddit, and two made it to the front page and sat there for a while on their own.

add a ?a=1 parameter to the URL and resubmit it.

Even if this trick didn't work, it's your own blog post so just add an anchor at the top.

Isn't the problem with this that Reddit does silent domain level blocking after a certain number of spam reports? At least, that's something I recall reading before, but it might not be true of course.

submit to reddit before you push the page to your site?

I think people are being a bit harder on this comment than they should be. It is phrased horribly, but I think jrockway might be making a valid point here.

Reddit still exists, but in name only. The site from even a year ago is dead and I think most of those users have left. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for reddit...their pageviews are way up and they're seeing some growing pains, which is a great problem to have :).

You just need to head over to the smaller communities to find all the old users.

> head over to the smaller communities to find all the old users

can suggest a few?

proggit, other specific technical-topic oriented subreddits. There is an astonishing number of them.

I went back to reddit a few weeks ago and found it pretty good. It's less about technology now, but the comments are as good as they ever were or better.

Bigger than ever it seems, one of the admins today said they're experiencing 20% growth per month.

...and 20% slowdown. Pretty unusable lately.

Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.

I sort of get what you mean, but your words taken literally are an amusing contradiction.

It's a snowquote - the original was Yogi Berra talking about a restaurant: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra