Recently, I've been pushing a weird little project to GitHub called RaaB. For those of you unfamiliar with buzzword naming convention, it stands for Reddit as a Backend.

Now, you might think this is absolutely crazy. Why would I put my content on Reddit and use some kind of convoluted API fidgeting to turn it into a presentable blog?

What is basically comes down to is sharing by default.

At the moment there is quite a gap between a developer's blog and the community at wide. I don't purport to be an communications expert but a post's life cycle seems to roughly progress in these distinct phases:

• Post something on your blog
• Your post gets reposted on social media
• People on social media talk about it
• People on social media comment on it
• If you're really lucky, people will actually leave a comment on your own website
• If you're really really lucky, someone will bookmark you

In my opinion there a quite a few things amiss with this pattern. First of all, whenever you post something, a shadow post is recreated somewhere else (for most developers, this will be on Reddit or HN). Because of this tracking a posts' popularity becomes a manual hassle.

Second of all, let's be honest, the amount of people who will actually bookmark or follow you is quite low. When you use Reddit to manage your content, your content is shared the instant you create it. The valley between "article" and "discussion" becomes quite small. While it's true that people will still repost your stuff somewhere else, at least this way there is a known resource where people can talk about it from the get go. Basically, you control the mode of discussion.

This brings me to another important point: Reddit's massive size. Reddit's developer user base is a lot bigger than say, Twitter or Medium. By a tenfold. What's more, for a lot of people Reddit is their "home on the internet". When someone subscribes to your subreddit, you become a part of their inner circle of interest.

I might expand on this post a bit more in the future, but in the meantime my reasoning mentioned above will hopefully warm you to the idea of doing this yourself!