YGingras^.net

When I started programming in '99, Slashdot was the big thing. I would read it as soon as I had time to waste. Be it waiting for the compiler to compile, waiting for the coffee to brew, or just waiting for 17h to arrive; Slashdot could fill my day.

Then something happened. I don't know when it happened and many disagree on that anyway but over time, Slashdot was not it anymore. More politic, more speculation, more outrage about insignificant quotes from famous persons. It was not news anymore; it was something else.

I tried to read Kuro5hin but that was still not it. It took some time for other geeky news sites to arrive and I was spending more of my "waiting" time on comic strips or even, and I do admit it with some shame, on Bash.

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For the blogger, making the front page on Digg or Reddit presents major impacts. It will bring in a tidal wave of traffic, several external links, a little fortune in adwords revenue and ultimately, crank up the page rank and consecrate the lucky author as the authority of a given subject. The initial wave is nice but it is the recurring traffic that makes websites lively.

Because of all the benefits of being reddited or dugg, it is not uncommon for a blogger to craft some of his posts in order to optimize his chance to make it to the front page on those popular news sites. There are even strategy guides to help him do that. One advice that is often given is to pick your submission time wisely. The idea that the submission time has an impact on the probability of making the front page appeals to common sense but it is supported by very little experimental data. Here I will describe a simple scheme to measure the activity patterns of social news websites.

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My post on building a better soda can stove was a test run for my new blog engine. For some reason, it got a lot more attention than I was hoping for. In turn, it rose to the front page on Reddit, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Makezine. Oh my...

What happened exactly? I'm not sure but I will tell my side of the story. I run this website on my home DSL. I have an upload cap of 80 kb/s. This is not great but until now it was plenty enough. Once my new blogging engine was running, I did a few test with Apache bench to see how responsive it was. Everything was fine and it didn't require much CPU load to saturate my uplink. But it didn't feel right, this test was way too artificial. At 7h16, I submitted my howto to Reddit, just to see a real world traffic spike. I didn't expect much, maybe a few hundred hits before I was down voted into oblivion. Exactly seven seconds after hitting submit, I had my first visitor. Not bad, I thought. Then an other one, and an other one, and it kept pouring like that for 36 hours. As I write this, I have brief periods of sub-saturation for the first time.

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