By “…our Infra team has had to block access to the thread in order to keep this from affecting other communities.” – Reddit Admins to a Reddit Community
Yesterday a brand new cryptocurrency token called CluCoin (yes another one) held a contest on Reddit to try and build their community (/r/CluCoin). The contest was a giveaway of 10,000,000,000 CluCoin tokens to a random member of the subreddit which at the time of writing has 91,842 subscribers.
Hours into their contest the thread suddenly disappeared and the mods were sent a message from Reddit Admin (staff member) /u/RedTaboo that read:
“Hey all!
Congrats on holding what seems to be a successful contest! Unfortunatey the thread for thread for the contest is currently hurting the stability of the site due to the large amount of comments. :/
Due to that our Infra team has had to block access to the thread in order to keep this from affecting other communities. It would be good for you, if you wish to continue, to cap threads and lock them as they become unweildy to prevent this from happening again.
I’m sorry we’ve had to do this, please let me know if you have any questions!”
Yikes. That is not what a brand or marketer wants to see as their community growth is starting to skyrocket thanks to a contest. It is also a little concerning that Reddit has this issue as it could lead to large-scale brigading of threads in an effort to get them deleted.
The bigger issue here though is that users felt ripped off when they saw the super-popular thread deleted which could have caused some brand harm or in the crypto space led to token sell-offs driving the price of the fledging cypto project into the ground. The community had also been Reddit’s most popular post for the entire day then suddenly vanished without any known reason and Reddit only notified the moderating team with a private message, which may have stunted their growth.
Credit to the CluCoin team they seem to have handled this sudden shift as well as could be expected showing some great Reddit Community Mangement chops. For starters they shared the above mentioned message with their community as quickly as possible letting everyone know what happend since Reddit doesn’t appear to have a mechanism in place to handle this situation well.
Then they let the community know in a follow up post that the comments that were posted to the now removed thread still exist and they will use those as entries into the contest and declare a winner soon.
Successful organic marketing on Reddit can be difficult as the community shuns most obvious forms of advertising and marketing, but they sure as heck love a cryptocurrency (or any kind of) giveaway. When you get a win on Reddit you also have to plan for this unfortunate eventuality, the Reddit Admins will do what is best for the whole site if they absolutely have no choice. Unfortunately when threads are taken down like this there is no message from the Reddit Admins to the entire community, which in this case led many to think the new token was a scam.
This is a stressful, gut-wrenching, spot to be in but it also means your marketing did an amazing job, even though it got cut short. Always have a fallback plan for going viral on Reddit, especially if you are running a contest.
Thread about this contest and Twitter: