How I Ended Up On The Front Page Of Reddit
“After repeatedly losing my package, Amazon finally delivered my monolith” - Razmig
#1 on r/All + r/Pics | 125K upvotes | December 1st, 2020
One time, many moons ago…
What feels like 20 years ago (2020), there was a mysterious monolith trending on Twitter. This was a time when things felt uneasy in the world…so it was nice having a distraction. This distraction inspired me to make a silly tweet, which was met with a dumb reply, which turned into a bad photoshop…and then ended up becoming the top post on Reddit (r/Pics)…and eventually #1 on r/All, spurring brands like Amazon to jump in on the joke with their own renditions. Here’s the story…
Where it started…
On November 23rd, I first heard of the a mysterious monolith in Utah on Twitter…while intriguing, I assumed it was either some sort of artwork or perhaps prop from a shoot that hadn’t been removed yet, or possibly a marketing campaign…
On December 1st, monolith was trending again, but this time it appeared in Romania. At this point it seemed like copycats were popping up and I figured I’d jump in on the trend with a joke about Amazon losing my packing. I tweeted “"I ordered a silver monolith on Amazon, come to find out they lost my package in Utah.” - and while I didn’t tag Amazon, the support team still responded in attempt to help…seeming like they didn’t even read the tweet.
With that, I replied with a poorly done photoshop I whipped up in about 10 minutes, with the monolith shadow and Amazon sticker being a last minute addition. I replied with the image saying the package came and Amazon considered it case closed…but it was only just the beginning.
To the Top of Reddit!
After getting replies from Amazon, I realized there was a lack of monolith specific posts on Reddit, as the trend was isolated to Twitter. So decided to submit a screenshot of the Twitter exchange as a native upload, but it was removed from r/Pics. I probably should’ve gone to r/Funny with the screen shot, but instead I just resubmitted with the same title and my photoshop picture instead.
I noticed it was picking up steam quicker than some of my previous posts, and while I was sure it’d hit the top 10 on r/Pics…it just kept going. Comments began trickling in, some commenting they had no idea what the picture was about, while others had clearly been following the trend. I decided to to leave a comment with a link to my tweet Imgur to see how much traffic I could drive (answer: 57K views) since I was unsure of self-promotion rules. After a deep dive on the self promotion rules on r/Pics, I was able to promote my YouTube channel in the comments as well, which brought about 15K views, and about 200 new subscribers there.
Soon it hit #1 on the sub…before becoming #1 on r/All or the #1 post on Reddit… The post received 125,110 upvotes, 1323 comments, gilded 400+ times, got me invites to some fairly unexciting private sub-Reddits like r/EliteClub. Truly bonkers for a picture of my front patio and a joke I’m sure several dozen people made before me that day.
The trending responses
Once the post had crossed to r/All, comments piled up asking about what it was, some people had no idea, some people thought it was marketing for Amazon…and unsurprisingly, they hopped in! Brands like SouthWest had already tweeted their own renditions prior to my post, but it was interesting to see how many brands tweeted their own versions on December 1st.
Meme Pages, News Blogs, & Takeaways
The next day (Dec 2nd) became the most interesting for me, as I began to watch how an image like this travels. It ended up on a few large FB pages (no credit), IG meme accounts with 2+ million followers (also no credits), 9Gag (they never credit), screen shots made it to Twitter (no credit), as well as some news sites who were just assembling any mention to of the monolith to drive clicks.
My biggest takeaway was takeaway was seeing first hand the loss of attribution following the viral nature of this type of content. Tracking its spread became harder and harder as meme accounts took hold, adding their own watermarks, creating their own frames, or sharing screenshots of tweets...Would adding a watermark have made a difference? I doubt it…but regardless, it was cool feeling like the funniest guy on the internet for a day.
Press & Links:
Original Reddit Post | Original Tweet @ Amazon | Imgur Gallery | Amazon Tweet Response
CNET | Vox | Newsweek | News18 Article | IndiaTimes
Images:
