Case study: How important is your Reddit link title?

I go onto reddit.com a few times a day to see whats new and/or interesting around the net, but hadn't really posted anything I thought was going to be popular until yesterday.

I'd seen a story on my local NYC news about an autistic highschooler who worked as his team's manager for a few years. He seemed like a genuine team player, rooting for his teammates at games, inspiring them at practices, and an all-around good kid.

His coach decided to put him in for the last 4 minutes of the last game of the season, hoping to get him a point. Someone in the crowd had a video camera and taped what turned out to be an amazing performance. The kid dropped 20 points in 4 minutes, including SIX three pointers. The crowd went absolutely wild, lifting him up onto their shoulders after he hit his last three pointer at the buzzer. I got goosebumps watching the thing.

When I got to work the next morning, after forwarding a link to the story with a video attached to everyone I thought might be interested I said to myself "hey, this would probably be a great thing to share on reddit.com." I searched for the word "autistic" on reddit, and didn't see any stories about the topic.

So I decided to post my own link. I linked to the news story online with the title "Real Life 'Rudy' - Autistic HS Basketball Team Manager Gets Playing Time." Within about 10 minutes the story had gotten 2 points. However I checked on and off throughout the course of the day and by the time I left work, it was at -1 points. I was perplexed. This thing was really cool... how could people not find it interesting?

Well I just logged on to Reddit.com today to check the status. Right at the top of the front page, I noticed something.... a link that read "Autistic Basketball Player Causes Mayhem" was sitting there with 91 points. I searched for my story and... it was at -3 points!! If you look at the Reddit search page for "autistic," you can see that my story was posted 12 hours before the other story. I wonder why it got such negative reviews being it was the same story?

My first impression is that your headline counts when you post something on reddit. The other person had an admittedly superior headline- simple, and fantastic. People see that and say to themselves "wow! causes mayhem!?!?! what did he do, kill someone?" so they click on it. Mine seemed well... kind of boring in comparison. I didn't get to the heart of the story in the headline, and I didn't suck people in to read it.

The other thing I noticed is that the video in the other link was superior. First of all it was at "youtube.com" which is really popular among people who really know their way around the internet. Second, it was a larger image, and the story was done by a more well-recognized anchor. I thought my link would be handy since it also had some text attached, and I can't comfortably watch videos on my computer at work so I figured it would be the same with other people... well i forgot about all of the college students and people who probably CAN watch video who use reddit.

Anyway, I guess my point is that reddit is like anything else in this world- you have to have some kind of a hook to draw people in. On reddit, it's your headline. It's also the cover of your novel, the first part of your sales pitch, the introduction to your presentation. It doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't get people to pay attention to it in the first place.