How To and What Is Cakeday, and What to Expect on Your Cake Day

I’m writing this for the sake of future searchers, as I didn’t find one concise location for cake day information, nor a “how to”. This is as accurate as I know as of this writing, April 2nd, 2014. Tried to write a LPT on it, but you cannot discuss Reddit at LPT’s.

I tried to search for information on reddit for my impending cake day, mostly without success, so I hopefully solved this for future karma worshipers.

**Cakeday, aka cake day**: The annual 24 hours which start the EXACT SECOND a user signed up for Reddit. NOT your birthday. You will not have a cakeday if you are not signed up.

**How do I find my cakeday?** : At least two easy ways.

Easiest of all is to go to [www.redditcakeday.com](http://www.redditcakeday.com/) and input your (or any) username.
Thanks to Tom Chapin for this handy and dandy tool.

As nothing lasts forever, even websites, to find your cakeday time within Reddit, read on. Click on your own username in the upper right corner, next to your mail icon|preferences|logout. . .

*(You just did that without reading the rest of this paragraph, then had to come back, didn’t you?)*

Once there, in the upper right corner is your username, any link or comment karma, gold remaining if any, and then in tiny script, “^redditor ^for ^______”. This ______ time span is how long you’ve been a redditor, given in various increments of days, months, and years.

Hover over the time span, NOT the “^redditor ^for ” part, and you will quickly see the exact second, in [UTC] (http://www.timeanddate.com/time/aboututc.html) when you signed up. Coordinated Universal Time is NOT affected by daylight savings, so the easiest thing is to check what the current UTC is.

Google [“utc now”](https://www.google.com/search?q=utc+now). If it gives it as PM, you’ll have to add 12 hours to make it military time. My own cakeday time:
Tuesday, March 27, 2012, at 18:11:13 UTC
aka 6:11pm.

Now you know when you signed up for reddit. . . so friggin’ what?

Posts and replies you make for 24 hours starting at your UTC signup month, day, and time will have a little cake symbol in them. That, as far as I can tell, is it. Some people will upvote more on cake symbols. Some people will upvote and some people will downvote if you mention it is your cake day in the Title of your post. Your mileage may vary.

The cake symbol *disappears* from your posts and links when your cakeday 24 hours is up. Looks a little silly to have “cakeday” in your title when there is no symbol, but since most up- and down-votes occur the first day, it’s your gamble.

Cakeday does NOT start at midnight for you unless you live in Greenwich Mean Time, Inglin, the Boss-Clock that tells *time* what *it* is.

For example, I posted 7 or 8 pictures and posts in the morning of what I thought was my cakeday, and only after *all* that work did I check the threads… to see NO cake symbol. I freaked a little, thinking I had missed my cakeday, that any tiny boost of karma for the cake symbol would be wasted. Woe, ripping of garments, and gnashing of teeth ensued!

Fear not, you karma whore, the cake symbol automatically appeared as soon as my cake-second rolled around at 18:11:13 UTC, and stayed there for 24 hours, until 18:11:13 UTC the NEXT DAY.

**Strategies**:
Title: To mention cakeday in the title or not? You may find it helps, you will also find people purposely downvote any karma-begging with the mention. Your gamble. If you are in a touchy-feely sub, mention it. For the rest of reddit, I’d leave it be, people that notice such things will notice and upvote.

Posting rate: Reddit limits how often you can submit links to prevent bots and spamming and psychopathic attention whoring. I do not know the rate, but my best advice is to read, re-read, and re-re-read your post before hitting the “Submit” button. Deleting a link, correcting one word, and trying to immediately re-submit it will get you a “You’re doing that too much” error message, then you sit in your own juices while you wait.

Copy all of your post before submitting! “Control+A, Control+C” BEFORE you hit the “Submit” button. This should happen in ALL content you put more than a few minutes into everywhere on the Internet. It selects the entire section, then copies the entire section. That way, if any error occurs (time-out, busy server, etc.), you haven’t just lost an irreplaceable hour of your life, all that formatting, all that editing, all those links. Upon an error, you can just Control+V into the window and try again.

Content: Should be the best you have saved up. Crap is not more appealing with icing and a candle in it (except in certain, disturbing, subreddits).

Timing: I accidentally posted a few hours before my cakeday, which gave the posts some time to get a few upvotes on the content alone, and if they earned their way up the chart, the cake symbol may have given a boost once some inertia was going.

On the other hand, that cake symbol might give the edge on initial posts to boost it early.

My experience: I missed my first cakeday thinking it was my birthday. Derp. Of all my cakeday posts, I happened to post a great picture in a big subreddit with AMA-level content… Edit: let’s leave it at “it worked out well”, with over a million views. I don’t want to blow my own horn, this is about getting **YOU** to the front page, you karma sponge.

Other posts I thought were great when I was posting them did okay, and one got immediately removed by the mods of the subreddit. My cakeday symbol was mentioned only a few times.

I’ll edit in any advice that comes along.

Good luck! (Control+A, Control+C, clicking “Submit” …)

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If someone tells me how to embed these exact strings or metadata in this post without the next obnoxious paragraph, I will edit it, but, bear with me:

How do I cake day? How do I cakeday? What is cake day? What is cakeday? When is my cake day? When is my cakeday? Best way to cake day? Best way to cakeday? Make the most of cake day? Make the most of cakeday? Cakeday strategy. Cake day strategy. Is cakeday my birthday? Is cake day my birthday?