Reddit, Celest and the Downvote Conundrum
Thursday, March 27th, 2008Celest being our first flash game and reddit being our favorite social-web2.0 style site, I thought we would submit the game and a few posts to reddit and maybe get some feedback. I was hoping to get some to get answers questions like: Is the game fun? Is it too difficult? too boring? Should I continue working on this game to make it better or will that result in a repeat of the same resounding sigh from the webs?
The first problem I had was that there a zillion sub-reddits now. In the early days of reddit these separate communities sort-of made sense, but now I can never figure out which one has the people that actually care about content like this. I posted the main game to both reddit.com and gaming.reddit.com. Both of those stories never really gained any traction. In an effort to help other flash developers I plan on writing blog posts that talk about some of the problems and their solutions that we had while creating this game. I posted the first of these articles to programming.reddit.com where it was immediately downvoted into the vast sea of near 0 point articles.
One of the problems this poses, is that a downvote gives me no ability to discern why something proved unpopular. Was it the mochiad up front? Do people hate my attempts at web design? Is the game terrible? Am I an awful writer? A couple of awesome people over in the comments section actually took the time to make a comment about it and most of the comments seemed at least a little favorable (there was no vitriol which can be a success on the internet).
When I have put in work to entertain others and this fails, it would be awesome, and certainly help me improve, if those others who deem my work insufficient would tell me why. Perhaps that is asking too much, but you don’t have to vote on everything. If you are ambivalent about it why downvote, maybe someone else actually will like it. But an ambivalent downvote means no one else will see the submission. Perhaps there is a better way to share what I am doing and get reasonable feedback about it.