The Reddit tsunami

Yesterday, a thread was started in the WTF Subreddit regarding a chastity device with an urethral insert (never seen it before so no idea who made it). Later on in the thread, after all the “OMG!!1!”-type comments, someone posted a link to my Looker 02 review (specifically mentioning the insertion video).

That was at about 1:00 in the afternoon, give or take. Almost immediately, I got a WordPress notification saying my stats were “booming.” I didn’t see it because it was a nice summer day and I was in the pool. My hourly views were about 13 times average. An hour later, I got another notification I also didn’t see. My hourly views were now 31 time average. Sometime between that notification and the next, I saw what was happening and why. The next bulletin from the WordPress bot was two hours later telling me my hourly views were 42 times my previous hourly average (which was itself inflating due to the tsunami of Reddit looky-loos). The last alert from WP told me I was getting 56 times my previous hourly average.

So yeah, Reddit can send a site a lot of traffic. At the end of the day, Denying Thumper had received over nine times the traffic from its previous highest day (when Dan Savage linked to me from his column).

This is one of those times where the venn diagram in my head that represents this blog gets fuzzy. On the one hand, yay, eyeballs. On the other, ew, eyeballs. I don’t really want to be a public figure but I do want to share my experiences and thoughts on a subject that isn’t often talked about in polite society. When Dan linked to me, I was thrilled because that audience is pre-qualified as the kind of people I’d like to think are reading me. The Reddit thing is the exact opposite. I was linked to from the WTF Subreddit, for fuck’s sake.

The silver lining came from Caged Bob on the Twitter following my tweet on this event:

I reckon that while the majority would be are fucktards, there will be a few who stick around to read & learn about chastity

This is the big question, of course. How many people curious about chastity and denial will hang around to learn more versus how many were just here to ogle at the freak? WordPress’ stats are pretty rudimentary (and, last time I looked into it, there was no way to integrate Google stats into a hosted blog). Oddly, the page linked to had twice as many views as the number reported as being referred from that post on Reddit. Most of the traffic seemed to hit that page and bail, but the homepage, the chastity advice page, and several others had about three to six times the normal views. That’s encouraging, I guess. Those people did more than skip off the site like a flat stone.

I’ll admit that my initial reaction to this attention was not positive. I don’t like being used as a sideshow freak. I pondered changing the URL to the page so the links would 404 and the prurient voyeurism of those clicking it would go unfulfilled. But I didn’t do that. While I don’t enjoy the attention, I’ll leave everything as it is and take the attitude that more than anything, Reddit is ravenous and will move its attention to some other site quickly enough (as the chart above already shows). The link to me will get buried in the Subreddit and the attention will quickly fade. And maybe 1% of those who found me from there will be open and receptive to what I’m doing here and get something out of it.

Maybe.