Anybody who’s ever got some traction on Reddit or Hacker News is familiar with the so-called “Reddit effect” when your site gets overwhelmed with referred traffic. Some sites in certain verticals are even able to convert this traffic. However, everybody also knows how strict Reddit is when it comes to spam submissions. Hacker News, on the other hand, might be easier to submit to but, unless it gets noticed by a lot of users and sparks a discussion, that submissions might as well go completely unnoticed.
But sometimes your content gets submitted without your knowledge, just because somebody who’s an active user of either social media site has come across it and found it submission worthy. Reddit and HackerNews are no Google or Pinterest though – there is no easy way to just create an account and watch your stats. These stats could have been useful for your future content creation efforts – if you know something gets traction, you might want to do more of the same and hope it produces similar results. Heck, you could even jump right into the ongoing discussion and try to drive it the best way for you and your brand – wouldn’t it be cool if you could do it?
So how do you know when your URL has been submitted to these sites?
There are easy but probably little knows ways to do it.
For Reddit, using the following URL format will show you all the submissions related to your domain:
https://www.reddit.com/domain/yourdomain.com/
E.g.
https://www.reddit.com/domain/irishwonder.com/
This will give you a list of all submissions containing your domain name, who submitted them, when, to what subreddit and what discussion happened around those submissions. Better yet, there is an RSS feed for that page which you can pull up in your favourite RSS reader or any dashboard you use for real-time notifications of future submissions (the RSS URL is right there in the page source code):
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”RSS”
href=”https://www.reddit.com/domain/irishwonder.com/.rss” />
As for the HackerNews, there is a URL parametre you can use to display all submissions for a domain, i.e.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yourdomain.com
E.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reddit.com
Unfortunately, there is no RSS feed in this case – there used to be an API but as it was powered by Firebase it’s no longer functional. So looks like in this case, you either have to scrape the data from the page yourself or just keep the page open in your browser and refresh it regularly.