Not really, but you'll get the point. The only things I've been posting to the likes of Digg, Reddit and Plime are those things that I think people will enjoy reading. I specifically never post anything with images because of how much bandwidth they eat up.
At 2:27 am (local time), I created a post with a cartoon. I didn't think anything of it and I definitely wouldn't have submitted it to anything. A few minutes later, while adding a plugin to the blog, I noticed the hit counter going up. So I decided to investigate. Blogpaul spotted the link on outpost-earth.com and then posted the link to Reddit!
Needless to say, I thought it would drop off in a few minutes. It didn't. In the last 5 and 1/2 hours, I watched the post rise to number 14 on the Reddit hot list before disappearing (it's still there, just not on the hot list). I also watched the hit counter climb from about 30 unique visitors to 2,690 unique visitors. At one time, there were 384 people on my blog at the exact same time. The only thing that saved the server was that fact that I was using the WP-Cache plugin. I have no idea when the hits to the website will drop back to normal.
The only thing I can think of that drove the post up was the simple word "lesbians" in the headline. I guess I'll never figure out these social news sites.
Update 1: Someone posted it to digg and it has received 20 diggs as of 1:40 pm, Manila time. You people are crazy!
Update 2: It's 6:00 pm local Manila time. 42 diggs and rising. I'm patiently waiting for the backlash that is the "digg effect". As soon as it starts, I'm bumping my cache up. Hopefully, my POS server can handle it then.
Update 3: At around 7:00 pm local time, I was spared the digg effect when someone buried the story — just before it hit the front page.
Final Update: As of this writing, near midnight local time, there has been 4,265 unique visitors today with 4,229 having viewed that post. And I'm still getting constant visits via reddit! I'm not used to this much traffic at all.
