When does the Narwhal Bacon? An Analysis of Reddit Posts:
Reddit is a website used for sharing links to interesting, funny, or relevant pages on the internet. It is formed by a collection of communities that are grouped by shared interests, and uniting these communities is a sort of score-system: karma. Karma is earned by scoring up-votes while avoiding down-votes. As a post increases in upvotes, it soars to the front-page giving it even more chances to gain recognition and up-votes.
A game arises when a user must decide where to post their story to gain votes. The size of reddit means that it is very hard to be the first person to post a link; however, a late post may garner more karma than an earlier post so long as it was posted to a community where it will gain recognition faster.
A player might decide to post to a larger community hoping that since the community has more members it will have more potential viewers. Another choice would be to post to a more specific community since there the post would be more likely to be up-voted by people who share a common-interest.
Getting more up-votes per down vote is great but it’s not very useful unless you get a lot of votes. Likewise, getting a lot of up-votes may not be good if you are getting too many down-votes – and can actually lose points.
The solution may actually be a coordination game between two users, A and B, where both users might maximize their chances for earning massive amounts of Karma by sharing the same link to both specific and large communities.
Another potential solution that does not involve coordination when choosing where to post is posting to well-connected communities. If the interest can be both specific and submitted to a well-trafficked community, then the benefits of fast recognition and high up votes can be achieved.
