Reddit Added to Alerts Summary

As promised previously, the Reddit data is now shown in the Alerts Summary page. Right now you can see all submissions from the past 24 hours from the domain names you're tracking.

The alerts are not being emailed out at the moment pending some more tests to calibrate when the alert should go out. The rest of the post explains how I'm thinking of structuring the reddit alerting service to give you an idea of what the calibration entails and how the service will work.

Reddit provides three pieces of info:

• The up-vote count.
• The down-vote count.
• The difference between the up-votes and down-votes, which is called the score. If the score is less than zero (e.g. 3 up-votes and 5 down-votes), then the score is set to zero anyway.

A low score can come about in two ways:

• Not enough up-votes, meaning people just don't like the submission.
• Lots of up-votes balanced by lots of down-votes, i.e. a controversial submission.

As a webmaster, you will want to know regardless of what the score is, and so right now I imagine the alerts to be sent out solely based on the number of up-votes.

The calibration is to figure out what is a good up-vote count to send out the alerts. I'm trying to find a number based on statistics so that in the future, I have a reproducible analysis to be able to watch for trends and to tweak the alerting service. If I can't find a decent statistical measure, I'll just guess a number. I'm hoping I'll have enough data in the next few days to be confident of the stats.

As ever, questions and feedback welcome. Please use the contact form to get in touch. Thanks!