After a two-week hiatus, the latest post at the blog takes the form of an interview with Andrei regarding the new scholarships he announced a couple weeks back. He talks about how the program came into existence, how it works, and some of what he hopes to see come out of it. The relevant links, as always follow. Given the nature of this particular post, I opted to post it to /r/d_language rather than /r/programming.

Blog: https://dlang.org/blog/2016/12/05/the-d-language-foundations-scholarship-program/

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/5glwes/the_d_language_foundations_scholarship_program/

On 12/05/2016 08:36 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> After a two-week hiatus, the latest post at the blog takes the form of
> an interview with Andrei regarding the new scholarships he announced a
> couple weeks back. He talks about how the program came into existence,
> how it works, and some of what he hopes to see come out of it. The
> relevant links, as always follow. Given the nature of this particular
> post, I opted to post it to /r/d_language rather than /r/programming.
>
> Blog:
> https://dlang.org/blog/2016/12/05/the-d-language-foundations-scholarship-program/
>
>
> Reddit:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/5glwes/the_d_language_foundations_scholarship_program/

Thanks for the great writeup, Mike! -- Andrei

On 12/5/2016 5:36 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> After a two-week hiatus, the latest post at the blog takes the form of an
> interview with Andrei regarding the new scholarships he announced a couple weeks
> back. He talks about how the program came into existence, how it works, and some
> of what he hopes to see come out of it.

I took the liberty of posting the above to the reddit topic.

As always, postings on reddit will get less than half of the potential traction unless there's a comment explaining why the user should bother to click on the associated link.

Your excellent work is wasted unless this is done :-(

On Tuesday, 6 December 2016 at 01:08:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/5/2016 5:36 AM, Mike Parker wrote:

> I took the liberty of posting the above to the reddit topic.
>
> As always, postings on reddit will get less than half of the potential traction unless there's a comment explaining why the user should bother to click on the associated link.
>
> Your excellent work is wasted unless this is done :-(

Thanks. I've noticed that when I leave such comments they initially get a number of upvotes, but in some cases they get downvoted over time. So now I've taken to only leaving them on posts where I can't come up with an obvious title for the reddit link. I have no way to say what sort of impact it has on traffic from reddit, though. Certain types of posts get more than others and I can't see any correlation with explanatory comments.

On 12/5/2016 8:16 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
> Thanks. I've noticed that when I leave such comments they initially get a number
> of upvotes, but in some cases they get downvoted over time. So now I've taken to
> only leaving them on posts where I can't come up with an obvious title for the
> reddit link. I have no way to say what sort of impact it has on traffic from
> reddit, though. Certain types of posts get more than others and I can't see any
> correlation with explanatory comments.

My unscientific, anecdotal experience with reddit is that the first post, written well, will spark positive interest and discussion. It's really the same thing you already did when you posted the link to the n.g.

A negative first post will frame everything negatively afterwards. We shouldn't leave this possibility to chance. First impressions matter here as much as anywhere.

No first post often results in nobody ever commenting on it. If I see a topic with no posts, I think "why waste my time commenting here, nobody cares about this and nobody is looking at it."

If a title alone is good enough, movies would not be marketed with trailers, and books would not have a back cover.

If you're writing first posts that get downvoted, I suspect that concluding that first posts are a bad idea may not be correct. Maybe it just needs to be a better first post :-) Next time this happens, please ping me or Andrei and maybe we can help.