well, sort of. Yesterday, my girlfriend and I posted photos of my friend Patricks recent journey across the country to the social news website, Reddit. The post went something like “So my friend decided to go on a road trip completely alone. He returned, 100 days and 10,000 miles later with these photos..” For those of us unfamiliar, Reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text “self” post. Users then vote the submission “up” or “down”, which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the sites pages. Each submission has to be assigned to a “subreddit”. There is a “subreddit” for pretty much any topic you can think of, e.g. r/pics, r/food, r/politics, r/programming, r/skyrim. The more upvotes you get, the longer your post stays at the top of the subreddit. But there is also the “front page” of reddit which is the “homepage” for anyone that types in www.reddit.com. The front page is an accumulation of all the submissions users have deemed worthy of the front page. Note* IT IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO GET ON THE FRONT PAGE

so yeah, we make this post to r/pics (since it involved the photos my friend took on his journey) at around 4pm yesterday. While I’m in my 5 o’clock class I get a text from my girlfriend, “17 upvotes so far:)”. I was thrilled. We’ve posted quite a few things and barely get 1 or 2 upvotes. Not more than a few more minutes pass by and I get another text “holy shit, 150 now!”. If you could’ve seen the grin on my face. Then another “310!”. The thing with these posts are that once enough people “upvote”, the growth is exponential. I quickly rushed home so that we could sit in front of the computer and watch the votes and comments come in. It seriously feels like winning the lottery. Cha-ching cha-ching cha-ching. Before you knew it, we were not only the top post of r/pics, we had made it to the front page. THE FRONT F* PAGE! Never did I think we’d be on the front page. The rest of the story gets a little convoluted as we invited some friends over to celebrate our 5 seconds of fame.

24 hrs later my friend Patricks pictures have been viewed by over 345,670 people and counting all thanks to the community of Reddit.