The Reddit ‘No Sleep’ Experiment

So do you guys reddit? With all the mandates on writers to use all forms of social media (including my reluctant creation of an account with Google+, which I’m still trying to get a feel for), I assumed that most everyone would have at least dabbled with the internet behemoth. After reading a post from fellow writer/blogger Katie Cross, however, I realized that may not be the case.

What is reddit? Man, is that a loaded question. In a lot of ways, reddit is a microcosm of the internet itself. It has everything you could possibly imagine—cat videos, pranks, world news, politics, technology, fitness, pop culture news, plus a plethora of content that is both NSFW and NSFL (and if you don’t know what those abbreviations mean, you’re probably not going to want to click on anything with those tags on them—not safe for work and not safe for life, respectively).

There are literally thousands of groups, all categorized into areas called subreddits, that you can subscribe to and decide what you do and don’t want to see; the music subreddit, for example, is listed as /r/music. There are links to content, such as photos, videos, and articles, as well as (usually quite lengthy) discussions about said content.

And just like the internet as a whole, there are several useful resources for writers: workshops where you can submit work for critique, articles to help you strengthen your skills, discussion groups about various aspects of writing…all, of course, helpful in its own way.

Then there’s /r/nosleep.

No Sleep is a subreddit dedicated to trying to frighten and disturb you; it’s kind of like gathering around a virtual campfire and swapping ghost stories. All stories are told in the first person as true experiences. The people who read the stories and leave comments treat them as if they’re real, because one of the guidelines is “Everything is true in /r/nosleep.”

One of the keys to reddit is its unique upvote/downvote process for determining what’s popular. It’s a bit like Facebook with added negativity. Anything submitted to reddit is subject to its users’ approval or disapproval. This goes for No Sleep as well.

After reading stories there for the last few months, I decided to give it a whirl. I had been tossing around an idea for a flash fiction story that I thought would meet the criteria of the group, so I submitted it last week. Surprisingly, it was upvoted by the majority of people who read it, and there were quite a few encouraging comments. Encouraging in that they all requested more—updates to the situation I detailed in my story. I then decided to write a second chapter with the intention of it being a bit of a bridge to the third and final installment, bringing the story to a (hopefully) satisfying conclusion.

So, first story: 152 upvotes, 37 downvotes. Not bad. Reddit’s nice enough to let me know that means 81% like it. Second story: 68 upvotes 19 downvotes. 78%. Still not too shabby, but the real story is in the comments. The first story had 33 comments, ranging from ‘keep us updated’ to ‘please update soon, the suspense is killing me.’ The second had 10, mostly just saying ‘uh-huh, keep us posted,’ and one sarcastic butthead. Obviously the first story resonated with people more than the second one. It’s not exactly a line by line critique of your work, but what I like is that it’s instantaneous feedback from some of the most honest people on the planet—anonymous strangers on the internet. If they don’t like your story you’ll know, because they simply downvote and don’t comment on it.

If you like to read creepy stories, or want to see how people like the stories you make up, jump on over to /r/nosleep and give it a shot. They have monthly contests for the most popular story, and a sort of a ‘behind the scenes’ subreddit for discussions about the group. I’ll be writing the conclusion to my epic saga in the next day or two, so you may be reading my story there soon. I may end up posting the whole thing here on the blog at a later date as well, time will tell. So, who are my fellow redditors out there?