Webcomic Workshop Vol. 1

Hi, I'm starting a new blog segment called Webcomic Workshop, because I'm almost ready to leave X forever and I no longer think it is beneficial to share my pearls of wisdom there.

So...

How the Reddit algorithm works (from an outside perspective)

These are my experiences engaging with /r/comics over 5 years. It has grown from 1 million subscribers to 2 million in that time and the upvote numbers mentioned below have stayed consistent.

1. Success is defined early

When posting to /r/comics, you will already have a good idea if a post is going to reach the top of the page or not in the first 2 hours. If it has more than 100 upvotes after 2 hours, it is trending in a good direction.

2. The shelf life of a comic is time-gated

If you reach the top of /r/comics within 4 hours, you'll be on track to trend highly on /r/all.

If you reach the top of /r/comics after 4 hours, you can still get some good numbers, but it won't be nearly as effective, as you will only be seen by the /r/comics community.

On average, the difference is 20-30k upvotes versus 3-8k.

A post with around 15k upvotes will begin to rapidly fall off at the 14 hour mark. If it's around 20k, it's more likely to start falling off the top position at the 18 hour mark. After 24 hours, no post continues in the top spot. You can look at what is currently trending and decide strategically when to post your own comic - I recommend doing it when the top post is 14 hours old, because it gives you time to rise and then overtake them as their post ends its time in the spotlight.

3. Downvotes are weighted against you

When you have 1 upvote and 1 downvote, your post is at "50%"; but if you have 1 downvote and 1000 upvotes, your post is still only ever at "99%" - this is because the % is always rounded down in favour of downvotes.

Early downvotes can be very bad for a post.

4. Time zones matter

A great strategy when posting is to post just before America, who are a large audience segment, wake up. You run a lower risk of being downvoted, and by the time they're opening the app, your comic is already trending near the top so more people will see it and vote on it. Most people are only looking at the top 3-5 comics as part of their daily routine.

5. People don't understand the numbers

Now that you understand all this, you will hopefully have a better understanding of why the comments section becomes increasingly toxic as a post does well. There will always be new people using the app who think that the numbers on a post should directly scale to how funny something is - an impossible goal. When you consider that the top 3 posts often look something like "500 upvotes", "3.5k upvotes" and "22k upvotes" you can imagine how frustrated that makes some people feel. It's not you. It's never you.

6. Playing to a crowd

Here are some observations about the Reddit crowd:

- They love reference humour

- They love simple jokes that make them feel smart

- They love recursive humour like "Guy travels back in time to the beginning of the comic at the end of the comic"

- They love meta humour, like character throws a punch in one comic and someone else takes the hit in an entirely different series, posted separately

- They hate brown and muddy colour palettes, preferring bright content. This seems extra true of readers on the spectrum, if you care about factoring in their needs.

- They get distracted easily by background details, assuming everything is supposed to be part of the foreground joke

- Large text is better, over 90% of people are reading on their phone

- Many readers speak English as a second language, or are dyslexic, or skim-read as they scroll past, so simple phrases are best. People love to tell everyone they misread the text at first and thought the joke wasn't funny because they misread it.

- But at the end of the day, this is just playing to averages, everyone is different and you should try different things

7. Success is cumulative, not guaranteed

I've attached a visualization of episodes 1-725, listing which ones passed 20k upvotes. R means it was a Repost and C means it was a Collab.

I hope it gives you an encouraging perspective that while not every post is a guaranteed success, you can be successful if you keep trying.

Can you spot any trends in which posts were the most successful?