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The Stackoverflow / Reddit Dilemma
by
Manakoon
https://manakoon.substack.com/p/the-stackoverflow-reddit-dilemma
How was your experience as an indie hacker in those communities ?
I've been on both Reddit & Stackoverflow for 4+ years and I get your point.
It's very easy to get downvoted while posting on Stackoverflow, most people will ask you to 'phrase your question properly', 'do research before posting' , etc.
On Reddit, the type of posts to reach the front page are mostly funny ones.
And yeah, 1 single link to your product & you can get banned from that subreddit entirely.
But, after spending so much time on Reddit I've figured out ways to post without offending anyone;).
If you want to add link to some external resource, don't do it until you get some upvotes / positive feedbacks from people. And once your post becomes popular no one will care about the links.
I managed to get some posts in, but this was really hard. I learned patience and fakery and learned how to watch the community first, learned to act like them and use their exact words when posting.
It was especially important to stay attentive to the first comment. But this will only damage the platform on the long run.
On Reddit I received bad feedback, but actually I see them like suggestions. Indeed I'm working to improve my products with those suggestions. I just don't care about useless comments. On Stackoverflow I'm the read-only one. :D
The saas, the entrepreneurial subreddit are kind of okay. I was working for a HR tool in germany and had to ask people in a german subreddit about work, how they feel about personal portfolios. apart from getting trashed and joked about in the comments. Some people thought i was a bot and opened my landing page imprint and starting posting my personal data on reddit.
People are crazy! :(
Oh calm down that's the world we livin Man Akoon
I don‘t really agree with you, i think its only an online problem. If i ask a question on the real life, i doubt that someone can bully me on my face.
Generally speaking I think you’re correct, but I’d offer two comments. The first is that I think Reddit is hard because for the most part they exactly don’t want someone “like us” just coming in and (in their minds) using the community for self promotion. They want to learn about things more organically, so it can be very difficult to crack (I still haven’t). The second is that even now I find myself a noob programming, but when I have a problem, I spend a lot of time googling and searching SO and experimenting before I post on SO. When I do post I say what I’ve done to try fix the problem, what I think it might be (if I have narrowed it down), and ask for specific help. I have had questions go unanswered, but haven’t felt bullied or shamed on there, posting as recently as recently as this month.
To be honest, this doesnt portrait my overall experience in reddit. Sometimes people were nice and some women took 30 minutes of her time and starting giving a really good, rich feedback.
Like i said i think the key, is karma, many posts and patience.
Most reddit posts are absolutely trivial in my opinion and they are very rarely helpful. While in Stackoverflow is a bit better I solved many programming problems, even if I did not like the fact that if people find your questions not interesting you will lose your reputation. Another problem is that Google often shows very outdated posts but this is a Google problem instead.
I think it depends more on the community and i think its lame that sometimes online communities, in the end will make us all read only people instead of contributors.
Just read your article. I agree 100% and have had almost the exact same experiences. There is straight up evil stuff going on on Reddit. I'm two years into coding so I've been on Stack Overflow a lot. I see so many rude comments to people just trying to learn. It's really sad.
There is someone who wrote a post on reddit, talking about how people in stackoverflow are a bit rude and he got bullyied by the reddit users, trolled and trashed etc .. and it seems like a lot of them are discord moderators and a lot of them are the ones that respond to questions in stackoverflow.
Ah, that makes sense. It definitely seems like there are people out there who live to be king/queen of some of these online communities. They must feel so powerless in the other parts of their lives.
I can feel your pain.
In my experience, this is an inevitable stage of growth in any society that becomes popular.
You must tell a really appealing story or gain some "social power" first.
„social power“ can you explain this ?
I felt fake really, sometimes i post something and get the information i want and after re-reading my post i get frustrated because i know that is not how i talk in real life and the whole post doesn‘t feel like „me“.
I mean reputation\karma\rating. Each community has it's own thing.
Thank you for sharing this. I think it is very important to be aware of the other side of Reddit !
Most of the Redditors tend to act as experts in their communities, which makes other Redditors trust product information and news found on this platform more than any other website. I guess this is how the platform basically works.
However, the anonymity makes it very easy for people to troll, harass, and post offensive or negative content. Blending in Reddit communities can be very difficult as you need to get to know these communities first and play by their rules in order to get good outcomes.
But sometimes you just can't blend .. Sometimes it's hard to express yourself in such communities. Because they dictate to you the type of content that you need to post there, so you will find yourself posting whatever they want and not what you originally intended to post.
I haven't used neither Reddit or Stack to get answers, but I have used StackOverflow to reply to software developing questions and I can say that Stack is a very good place and you can find anything related to programming. As for reddit, I only use it as a social platform, to check out memes and stuff...
Reddit is a good tool to validate your idea, if your niche is in a subreddit. For Stackoverflow, the bullying that every noob is getting there is beyond discussion.
People tend to be more rude than helpful in these platforms.
@Manaayed do you only use reddit for validation or do you have other platforms ?
I tried Instagram for a while, but I quickly figured out that it was the wrong channel for me, so posted On Reddit in several subreddit. I only got one constructive critic that I used to make some improvements, all other comment were more or less trashing comments
Reddit, discord moderators and Stackoverflow are full with rude people.