Reddit is the game of points. If you succeed to get a lot of points, then you will win! There are two ways to get points:
- Post a top-level submission, which receives upvotes.
- Post a comment on a submission, which receives upvotes.
This creates an interesting social dynamic. If no one upvoted anything, then no one would get any points, and everyone would be tied! Nonetheless, upvotes still happen and it's very hard to prevent something from being upvoted. There are downvotes as well, but it seems that downvotes are less common. Intuitively, this makes sense. To receive upvotes, you need visibility, and upvotes beget visibility. Maybe there is some innate reason in human behavior why there are more upvotes than downvotes as well. Observations aside, we want to win Reddit by getting lots of upvotes, so how do we do it?
Trick 1: Find or create an upvote haven. An upvote haven is a magical place where everything (submissions and comments) are upvoted constantly. What is great about this haven is it has gravity. Since people like to win, they will post and engage in upvoting. The more activity, the more appealing to newcomers. Mysteriously, this upvote haven (which is typically a single subreddit), once reaching some degree of critical mass will begin leaking to the rest of reddit, pulling people in and building more momentum. Haven is probably a conservative term for what this phenomenon is.
Trick 2: This and the rest of the tricks involve taking advantage of the subreddit haven, and protecting it. One way to take advantage of the subreddit haven is to use to create more havens. If you're an active participant or an admin, people may look into where else you submit/comment. You can simply create your own subreddit and hope that activity from one of the subreddit havens you participate in will leak into that subreddit. You can then virtually use the same submissions/comments in multiple havens for the same effect.
Trick 3: It's important to protect your haven. This is a competition after all. If your haven is helping you and your comrades get more points than other people and their comrades, then the scale of winning will become imbalanced. People may try to disrupt your safe haven by injecting downvotes. They might also take advantage of your haven by trying to leach off the upvotes. Knowing this, make your haven very opinionated and divisive to the point that it discourages non-members from participating.
Trick 4: Attack other havens to tip the scale in your haven's favor. The less havens out there, the more appealing and powerful yours will be. This offensive strategy has two obvious forms: belittlement and recruitment. By being overtly negative to other havens and reinforcing this behavior within your community, you may be able to overcome the defenses of other safe havens. Put more simply, if you have 100 participants per hour, and another haven has 10 participants per hour, and your community always downvotes the other community, you will have a net negative impact. Recruitment is similar. By taking advantage of people's desire to win, you can make it unreasonable for them to continue participating in other havens besides your own.
Winning at Reddit is simple and straightforward, it only requires focused time and organization.