Commenting Allowed

Just go onto http://www.reddit.com/r/writingprompts and the constellation of other "sub-reddits" on writing, and if you're good (you're not) you'll get noticed!

No need to pay for anything

The above comment came from a, I like to think, well meaning Alex In California.

I have heard about Reddit before. My friend Brian Hudson once told me that he had enjoyed a particular thing that I had posted here and had "put it on" Reddit, or whatever he did.

I went to the "writing prompts" page, if page is what you call it, and there was an option for me to "subscribe" to it.

But, at the top was an option for me to "sign up," for what I assume is Reddit.

Shouldn't I join Reddit before I subscribe to the writers prompt?

Having learned at this halfway point of my life to be more patient and prudent, I saved all of the documentation under categories like "What is this?" "How do I use this?" "How do I not get banned?" etc.

I even went to the Wiki page for Reddit and the Wiki page for writing prompts and save both, intending upon reading up on all this stuff.

I wanted to be like the guy who reads the entire manual that came with his, say, new VCR, if this were in 1984, before even taking it out of the plastic wrapper never mind plugging it in. I figured that, with a better understanding of what Reddit is, I could best determine how I could use it to my advantage, and avoid breaking so many of their rules as to get banned or be labeled a troll.
These are two things which I have fallen prey to in the past.

Once, when this very blog was "removed" by Blogger, before Google owned it, I went to a help forum and stated my problem.
But, being a newbie, I started a new thread in order to do so, even though there was already one with the heading of "My blog has been removed, what do I do?" or words to that effect.

This prompted other users of the forum to openly ask: Why did he start a new thread?" to which the overseer and tech guru openly answered something to the effect of: Because he's a troll, and he's after us all, and then went on to give the name that I supposedly used to go by, when I trolled, I guess and then assured the rest of the blogger help forum readers that he was going to ferret out "where else he has posted," and I guess take actions to have me banned and exposed as a troll at those other sites.
Needless to say, I never got any help and my blog remained removed, with about 3 years worth of posts being lost.

Then, I was recently barred from posting to the Ubuntu Linux help forum for submitting questions in the wrong form, or something.
This was after I was having trouble accessing a hard drive that I must have foolishly "encrypted" when I had set it up, about a year before having trouble with it.
My question was something to the effect of "How do I get into an encrypted drive when I have misplaced the password?"
This drew a few responses which I might have anticipated, like the sarcastic "What good would encrypting a drive do if there was a way to get into it without the password," which made sense to me, too late to save me from being banned from posting more questions.

So, this time would be different. I clicked on all of the "about Reddit" type pages and saved them, planning upon reading up on them, so I could enter the community knowledgeable enough to not be labeled a troll, and to not ask forbidden questions.

That being said, I decided that no harm could come from my merely signing up for the thing.

So, I signed up and was greeted by a page telling me that Reddit works better for people if they are subscribed to at least five communities.
And they had even started me off by subscribing me to five of them.
The first one was the "writer prompt" community which I had only just heard about from reading Alex In California's comment on yesterday's blog post.
This could have conceivably resulted from the fact that I went to the Reddit website by going directly to the writers prompt page, sure, maybe I would like to subscribe to it.
But then the next one that I was made a member of, by default, was a keto diet community.
Wait a second...that's the diet that Alex In California has blogged about.
Did the software sign me up for that just because someone who commented on my blog sent me a link to it once, in case I wanted to check out that particular diet? Or was it because I did click on the link and check it out?
And, then, I was given a subscription to a "water fasting" community along with a couple others to make up the five, which is their recommendation as the bare minimum.
On Facebook, I am a member of a water fasting group. But, I'm also the member of a half dozen other groups, devoted to other topics that I wasn't subscribed to automatically, such as the I Love Igor Stravinski group, or whatever it is.

Part of me was thinking: Oh, how cool, five things that I'm really interested in, and I'm already subscribed, and another part was thinking: This is kind of freaky. The ads popping up in the sidebar advertising harmonicas and other gear that I have bought from the MusiciansFriend website didn't do anything to assuage the eeriness of it all.

But, perhaps when I am home reading the Wiki page and all of the "What are we?" and "How does this work?" pages, I will be able to understand things more.

I did go ahead and subscribe to a couple dozen communities, because they sounded so darned interesting.

And, sure, if my writing is good (and it isn't) then...

I will probably just ask a moderator how Reddit figured out that I might like to be a member of a water fasting community...a wild guess, or what?