Upvote Addiction

Reddit is a funny thing. I never had very much interaction with the site until I wanted to share my findings surrounding how weapon damage worked in Activision's new Destiny franchise. I threw my data in a Google Doc, penned a quick post about the key takeaways, and went about my game playing.

A couple hours later I had received 100s of upvotes, been gifted Reddit gold, and had dozens of praising comments thanking me for my work. I was hooked. I had to respond to everything! Had to learn more! Had to leave no stone unturned to answer people's questions! I obsessively checked my upvote count: 513..718..1325! Euphoria!

I spent that whole next weekend packaging my rudimentary tables into a beautiful, interactive web app with charts, graphs, autocomplete search, and contribution forms. I collected more data to round out everything I could. I re-posted all of my hard work with new findings and a custom domain to boot destinygundamage.info. I awaited the upvote flood and comment adulation I was so desperately seeking, but it never came. 42 was the highest I ever got. The post that did get 2000+? Dancing on Atheon...

Reddit is a fickle beast.

UPDATE 1/17/2015: I ended up getting my high once more when International Business Times picked up the site as one of the top 5 Destiny communities. We'll see how long this one lasts me...