On 12/5/2016 8:16 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
Thanks. I've noticed that when I leave such comments they initially get a number of upvotes, but in some cases they get downvoted over time. So now I've taken to only leaving them on posts where I can't come up with an obvious title for the reddit link. I have no way to say what sort of impact it has on traffic from reddit, though. Certain types of posts get more than others and I can't see any correlation with explanatory comments.
My unscientific, anecdotal experience with reddit is that the first post, written well, will spark positive interest and discussion. It's really the same thing you already did when you posted the link to the n.g.
A negative first post will frame everything negatively afterwards. We shouldn't leave this possibility to chance. First impressions matter here as much as anywhere.
No first post often results in nobody ever commenting on it. If I see a topic with no posts, I think "why waste my time commenting here, nobody cares about this and nobody is looking at it."
If a title alone is good enough, movies would not be marketed with trailers, and books would not have a back cover.
If you're writing first posts that get downvoted, I suspect that concluding that first posts are a bad idea may not be correct. Maybe it just needs to be a better first post :-) Next time this happens, please ping me or Andrei and maybe we can help.
