Hi everyone! I'm HyperAnthony and I recovered /r/virtualreality in August 2011. It had been around for about 2 years, but with no articles and only 7 readers. It has been growing very slowly since then, and within the past month or so I've begun a dedicated effort to start growing the reddit and encourage conversation. The sub itself is described as "a common ground for discussion relating to Virtual Reality and Virtual Worlds." Anything from crappy MMOs to the latest in virtualization research is fair game.

That said, I've tried a good number of things to get people to come and visit, and I'll share those here in the hopes that my experiences can help other mods. Maybe that other mods can offer me some advice as well. :)

What works:

• Posting Daily -- "If you build it, they will come." With Reddit, this quote probably needs to be extended -- "If you contually build it, they will come." Finding interesting news articles or videos can keep your existing readers interested, and can attract other redditors from the new queue. You might even get the occasional thanks from a reader if you share quality stuff!

• Sharing the subreddit in the comments section of other threads -- I search reddit daily for some relevant terms... Virtual reality, Virtual world, VR, Avatars... things like that. I'll often find posts that were ignored in larger subreddits, and invite the OP over to ours. I've gotten a good few subscribers like that.

• Crosspost quality content to other relevant subreddits -- If you create or come across content that another community may be interested in, crosspost your reddit thread to their community. I've begun doing this with a Weekly Discussion Thread and its gotten the biggest response of any post on /r/virtualreality to-date.

What hasn't worked:

• Uninspired Advertisement -- Two of the examples above are of promoting my subreddit in ways that benefit an OP or another subreddit. An example of this not working very well is heading around to other reddits for the sole purpose of promotion. Places like /r/promote are nice, and you will probably pick up a few people, but I've found that the problem with them is that most of the other people there are there to promote things too! It might as well be a big echo chamber.

• Encouraging users to link to their created content -- This one was disappointing for me because as a virtual reality reddit, I'd imagine some of the readers would be object modelers, avatar designers, or programmers. I posted in an effort to open the place up to user content, but there wasn't much of a response to it. I may try this again as we get more subscribers.

What I would like to try:

• More Weekly Series -- As I mentioned above, our VR Weekly Discussion has gone over really well for such a small subreddit. I think this was because it targeted such a broad audience (users of various platforms) and I'd like to work some more in that vein, perhaps doing a spotlight on specific platforms as some sort of weekly feature.

• AMAs -- I would love to have an AMA series, and I know a few people that would probably be interested in it... but I'd like to hold off until our number of readers increases a bit. I'm not comfortable with inviting AMAs yet because we still have a good deal of threads come through that don't recieve any comments... and I'd hate to have someone come in and not get asked any questions. :(

Again, if anyone has any suggestions... let me know! I'm sure our growing community would appreciate the help, and I hope I'll be a useful contribution to this community too. :)