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:

All over Europe, a couple African and South American visitors! Still waiting on an Antarctican. Probably not much climbing there…
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!
I’m really intrigued to read the transition of your thought process. I’d really like to sit with you and discuss that process: not just by phone and most definitely not by text. Observing how you learn has always fascinated me. I’m especially intrigued by how you handle having several thousand people tell you you’re an asshole! You are such an intelligent individual.
Mmmm, graphs… Mmmm, analytics…