Tips to improve your reddits and build karma

This post was orginally loated at http://socialnewswatch.com/reddit-tips/, however this site seems to have been suspeneded. So I am reposting here simply as a cutosy to socialnewswatch.com and so that i dont' loose it.

Trouble with Reddit? Here’s some tips from qgyh2, the Reddit Jedi Master

Author’s Note: As of 11/23/2007, this story has 75 Diggs, 83 Propels, 13 Stumbles (5 Reviews), 27 Mixxes, 42 Sphinns, and negative 5 votes on Reddit. Add your vote… to the story submission and/or to the submission that points to the story submission.

RedditSince the beginning of the year, I’ve been studying the major social news websites. Reddit, being one of the top ones, was obviously tops on my list. I did everything that seemed to work well on Digg, Propeller, Newsvine, and most other social media sites.

The results were different from the others. I was successful in the others. Needless to say, I wasn’t successful at Reddit.

My first technique was simple. Make friends, spam a lot, wait for the “Karma” to rise. It didn’t. Actually took a week to break 20. I wasn’t happy, but I kept trying.

I’ve discovered some tricks and tips, rising to a marginally respectable Karma around 1700 over several months. Most of those points have come in the last two. Still, I really couldn’t find rhyme or reason to what was working and what wasn’t. Stories that I thought would surely hit the homepage got down-modded to oblivion, while others that were decent stories at best got dozens, even hundreds of votes.

So, I asked.

I started messaging a bunch of the top dogs on reddit. Sadly, I received few replies. Perhaps it was my message:

Hello (name),I just wanted to say hello. I’ve been marginally active in Reddit for a little while. Lately, I’ve started to become more active and I wanted to message my “friends” and really try to be a friend on Reddit. For a while, I’ve not quite understood how Reddit worked. Now, I’m trying to learn. Any advice you can give me would be great. Should I send messages? Make more friends? I really want to be active on here.Thanks! DiffeeOnline Over 80 messages sent. Seven replied. The advice was great from those who bothered. One in particular stood out, and to my pleasant surprise, it was a response from qgyh2, the Reddit member who gets more Karma in a day than I’ve been able to accumulate over several months. Here is the response:
Hi! thank you for your kind words!! well… I would suggest some of the following:

• post a wide variety of stories
• if a good story is buried, delete and resubmit - by this I mean sometimes if you post a story that a lot of people like, and some people downmod also, its worth deleting it and resubmitting it in an hour or so.
• keep trying - reddit is sometimes rather saddening as people keep downmodding stories. Just ignore this and keep submitting the stories you like. Pretend that there is nobody else but you and just keep submitting what you like and believe in.
• after submitting a story, watch it and delete it if it is heavily downmodded - sometimes people will start to downmod a story for some random reason - e.g. they don’t like it - when this happens it can affect your karma score so its best to delete the story - but first be sure that people are not upmodding the story also! because if people are upmodding also then it could be a good story!! yes do send messages to people. some people on reddit are quite good and they are friendly. besides i guess its always worth a try. some people may not respond but some people do.. and a few would become friends so why not :) well, wish you best of luck on reddit! keep trying you can get there!!

WhiteCanyon- Identity theft software

The part about deleting concerned me. Was it ethical to take a story that had been down-modded and resubmit it? Wouldn’t the results be the same?

I tried it, and within a few posts, I understood. Some excellent stories get dumped because the way the system works now, it only takes a handful of abusive users to down-mod a story and make it virtually invisible. A couple of great stories would have never made it to the light if it wasn’t for this advice.

THANK YOU, qgyh2. Your concern and willingness to take interest in a junior-reddit-jedi-padawan-wannabe and offer a thoughtful response reinvigorated my belief that Reddit can be very useful and enjoyable in the social news segment of the Internet.

Here are some other great points from the advice I received from other members:

• I would advise probably doing the same as you’ve done to me - sending friendly emails and working a relationship. Reddit is a little different where friends are not held as accountable as sites like Digg where you can actually see if a friend has voted or not.
• Otherwise, the only other advice I can offer is don’t be discouraged if your submissions are not instant hits - keep trying.
• The best way to be active in the reddit community, AFAIK, is submit good stories, thoughtful comments, vote often.
• You can view your friends post here. Here is a good place to learn the commenting syntax. People on the programming subreddit can be a bitch. Beware of getting into fights with trolls. Sometimes a quick and witty smartass reply can be better than a long thought out one. Looks like you have enough karma to get past the posting block, so you are good there.
• My main advice is to have fun. It’s a place to read about what’s new online, and to see peoples takes on it. This will show you the base rules to making nice. You don’t always have to follow, but do what’s fun for you.

I hope it helps!

Stock Market Spam

Do you get those weird spam emails? The ones that tell you about some stock and how important it is to buy it?



The first "interesting" thing about this spam, is that if you look in the preview window, it does not look like anything about a "stock". It usually contains some random text, that somewhat looks like it makes sense, but when you open it the text is immediatly replaced by some other text (actually it's an image with text in it). Tell you to "watch out for this stock", and the stock symbol, and tell you to invest in it.

When this type of spam first hit in the internet, it made it through a LOT of spam filters and ended directly in the inbox. The reason is simple, the spam filters could not read the text in the image, only the text in the email, which did not appear as spam. Sort of an "evil" way of using CAPTCHA technology

So that's the first part - the question that I pondered for a long time was "WHY?". 99.9% of all spam is trying to sell me somthing. Spammers send mass emails to hundres of thousands of people, to make money. They hope that some percentage of people receiving the email will sign-up/click on a link, buy some product and the 'spammer' gets money. If there NO money in it - there would be a lot less SPAM !

But - if I get an email - telling me to buy a stock, how could this possibly make the spammer any money?

The Answer - "It's called PUMP and DUMP" - and it is an illegal stock market trick. Like most scams, it has been place long before the internet - the internet just makes it easier !

How it works:

The theory is pretty simple - the price of a stock is largely dependant upon the news releases, media information sent out about the stock. The more people that buy a stock the more the stock is "worth" and the price of the stock increases.

So let's suppose, I look at my local newspaper business page, and find a small (penny stock) and purchase 200 shares at $0.05. Normally, I would then sit and "hope" that the company does some amazing things and the price of the stock sky-rockets (say to $50.00 / share). So then I sell my stock and make a tonne of money (My initial $10 investment is now worth $10,000). Of course the odds of a given stock incresing by 1000% is pretty rare?

But what if you could get thousands of people to buy the same stock you did - this would create a "fake" demand for the stock, and thus would make the stock increase.

This would be similar to cheating at a gambling table, or paying off a boxer to loose a race. The race (market) is fixed in your favor and again this is illegal !

So this is how it happens and why you recieve this type of spam. Another name for this idea is known as Microcap Stock Fraud

Now just imagine with all the "evil bots" out there like Storm_botnet and the potential power such botnets could have to control the stock market, and economy of occasions, all by a few little hackers out there directing their hundreds of thousdands of bots to go out and spam others - practically anonmously.

So what can you do?

Thankfully, most spam filters have been updated to detect these types of messages and put them in our spam folders where they belong.

However, the overall strategy remains the same. If you feel you are being sent spam and it is arriving in your inbox

1) Alert your ISP (or sys admin guy), and ask if they an update your spam filters.

2) Use a great spam filter program like SpamBayes to improve your spam filtering

3) Don't under any circumstances, click, buy or purchse anything from the spam email. Again they only do this to make money - if they don't make any money, they will stop doing it!



Link to cool article from shields up too !