One word: trolls

I speak from only a little experience here. I have been blogging for years. First on Fictionpress, then on Myspace, later on Blogger, and recently on WordPress.

The fact is that when you submit a blog to any open source site (like Reddit, for example) you start out with +1. This means that if the first person who comes along to read your submission, doesn’t like it, and they down-vote it, you may as well resubmit some time later and hope that a few people will actually read the blog and either upvote, or leave it alone.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but my understanding of the up-vote/down-vote system is that if you like something, you up-vote, and if you do not, you leave it alone. As far as I have understood, the down-vote is specifically there for unrelated content (links in the wrong subreddit) or inappropriate content (rickrolls, or something that is clearly an advertisement). Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Anyone who has ever submitted content to a open-source type site, knows that its entirely hit-or-miss. You may see a spike in your views, which you are greatful for, but, mostly, you just hope that you get upvoted more than you get downvoted. Unfortunately, unless you’ve established yourself as an official blogger, and have a large following, you aren’t likely to get far.

So this blog is to all the other bloggers out there. Keep trying, the more we submit, the more we are likely to get people to enjoy our work.

And the following is to the trolls: Please stop downvoting things you just don’t like. Case and point: I submitted a link to the Philosophy Sub-Reddit and it had 11 Up-votes very quickly. I was elated. Suddenly, the Troll-Patrol must have finally made their way to the Philosophy Reddit, because one terrific individual posted “wow, this is shit.” and clearly downvoted me. At first i read that as “wow, this is the shit.” only to continue reading his incomprehensible rant and realize that wasn’t the case. I replied to his comment as nicely as I could, asking him to explain his reasoning further, but it was too late, the Troll Patrol had already struck and I was downvoted to the bottom of the page. And one terrific individual even commented simply “Lack of analytic rigor: downvote.”

The life-expectancy of a submitted link to a personal blog is probably anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour. Thankfully my submission lasted almost 2 before it was overrun.

In conclusion of this blog (I fully expect this to be instantly downvoted and nobody will see it) I would like to place myself in the shoes of a troll for a moment….

UPVOTE IF YOU HAVE A PERSONAL BLOG AND HATE DOWN-VOTER TROLLS!!!

… thanks for your time.