Media promoter James Andrews brings up a very interesting topic of discussion in his YouTube vlog about the social media site Reddit: that moderators and administrators are against self-promotion of start-up and smaller companies, while supporting and allowing celebrities and large firms promote their causes with no resistance.

My theory as to why celebrity AMAs (ask-me-anythings) are left untouched by moderators is to attract more traffic from internet users who do not usually visit Reddit as a news distributor and social media site.  Big-time celebrities, such as Jay Leto, Stephen Colbert, and even US President Barack Obama, have used Reddit to promote their causes, books, movies, etc.; which violates some of its self-promotion rules.  However, deleting these celebrities’ posts would cause a media-storm, giving Reddit a bad reputation, funneling traffic to other sites, such as tumblr and Pinterest.

But why doesn’t Reddit allow people like James Andrews with his indie-rock promotion site to post their product to users who actually enjoy it?  Does it not make sense for Reddit to maximize internet traffic by not diverting the “little-man” elsewhere?  Reddit has been known in the past few years to be the site to incubate these start-ups, so they should stick to their roots and allow self-promotion.

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