A while back my essay on Science Fiction Rules was posted on Reddit.com, a link sharing site with an active (rabid) group of followers. It was in the SciFi section and I learned that this portion of Reddit is more active than some of the others. Over the course of a week I received about 500 hits from the site.(It didn’t matter that most of the users were idiots and hated my ideas. A hit is a hit.)

The Reddit.com users discussed the site and I was also included in a section called controversial, because of all the comments and the up and down votes the site received.

I tried to reproduce the success by writing what I thought was another controversial essay, but have had mixed results. So far there has been no discussion and got less than 100 hits from Reddit.

I think the essay was probably too dry. I wrote an article about Science Fiction’s views of life after death because I thought it would be provocative, but there were no pictures and most people arrived at the page, saw nothing but words and closed the window.

I think my main mistake was thinking that people would read a 2,000 word essay. I should have used clip art and subheadings to break up the text a little.

I briefly discussed ghosts, souls, resurrection, and reincarnation. It might have helped if I had some ghost pictures or images of graveyards and souls rising to heaven.

As it was, the short attention span of the average surfer got in the way. Even though the subject was controversial, the presentation was not provocative enough to the average fifth grade level reader.

I will try again in a few weeks. I’ll think of something that will inspire comments such as race, religion, sex or politics and this time use pictures and big type sub-heads to pull the weaker readers through the text.