Hi everyone–just a quick photographic journey through the last month or so. I was pretty blown away about what happened.

Being Responsible

If you remember my second post (Being Responsible in a Digital World), I was pretty excited to see this:

Then, I had that weekend at the New, and posted a quick thing on Facebook. The discussion was pretty heated, so I wrote Rock Climbing Horrors and posted it on Facebook:

Rock Climbing Horrors

A couple friends shared my post, and one friend of a friend apparently posted it to r/climbing on Reddit (because he liked it and there have been discussions of ethics there recently). It reached the front page:

I was pretty excited and flattered. Then, I saw this in my email:

At first, I thought “Yay! A bunch of people agreeing with me!”. So I opened them up:

They were not happy. I proceeded to go through over 50 comments and follow up comments, most of which were talking about how much of an ass I was. Then, I went through 100+ comments on the Reddit page itself, most of them saying the same thing.

I thought “Okay that sucks, I guess everyone hated it!”. Then I went to check the traffic. Holy crap, check this out:

I was blown away. I wasn’t even at the top of a pretty small sub-reddit, and got 3K people to the site in one day.

Training Schedule

At the same time, I was putting together a training schedule for climbing, and I realized I could capitalize on this success. So, when I was done, I posted it to r/climbing again with the title “Hey, I’m that Arrogant Asshole from last week…”, hoping they would think it’s funny and not just dumb (a bit of a gamble–a title can make or break a reddit post).

This time, there were 3 or 4 comments, and all of them positive. It wasn’t as controversial, but it was still successful:

Also, the traffic was from all over:

Here’s the Location report for that week or two:

Really cool. Also, there have been ~30 visits to the site every day since then. I checked and (if I did it right…) there have been almost 150 downloads of the training doc! It was the first time I’d ever built something for other people, so I was pretty excited.

So What?

Anyways, this was all very cool, but I learned a couple things:

1. Any news is good news: Even though there were a ton of negative comments, my site got a decent amount of exposure, which should grab me a couple RSS subscribers and maybe some return visitors.

2. Internet-ers are quicker to insult than to praise: While the 100+ comments were discouraging, there were almost 3,000 visitors that said nothing. I’d like to think they were silently nodding their heads :).

3. Expect anyone: I wrote the post intending mainly a couple Facebook friends to see it, so I lay the sarcasm on thick. To strangers, this came off as arrogance, which pissed some people off. In the future, I’ll plan on taking a day and calming down first, and writing a little more of a neutral post. Lessons learned.

Thanks for reading!