Sanity check: is using links to your personal blog as a glorified text post type reasonable?
As a follow up to this, I now have a blog that I intend to use for longer write-ups on things I find interesting enough to want to share, and continuing this chain of thought, it would effectively fill the purpose of what I would until now use a text post for. This very post serves as an obvious counter-example of something that would make sense as a blog article, so there would presumably be exceptions, but overall that would mean I would switch from text posts to links to my blog where the text is (and I'd probably add a collapsible copy of the article as a comment for redundancy in case something happens to the blog. I have no idea if I'm keeping this specific domain name in the long term, and in fact I do want to switch to a proper domain name I own rather than using yunohost's domains, but for right now it's not in the cards.).
To me, this reasoning makes sense and isn't in conflict with Tildes' principles, however I have a concern regarding the code of conduct's self-promotion policy, specifically the it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site part. My gut tells me that I would be in the clear since the overall intent of this policy is to curb outright advertising and self-serving behavior, and I assume linking to my blog which is non-monetized and decoupled from any endeavor I might profit from wouldn't apply. While I think this is the most natural interpretation, I can't argue in good faith that, taking the text purely at face value outside of the broader context, "ceasing submitting text posts and replacing them with links to my blog" isn't pretty much making that blog the primary reason I post on the site (at least outside of the comment section).
So, as a sanity check, I'm asking if going ahead with this does fit the expected conduct on Tildes and I'm not missing something that makes it not okay. If I am missing something, what should I do instead?
You are free and clear to do this.
You are an active user who takes part in this site in good faith. Your primary reason for being here is clearly not to share posts from this blog. That is reductively true, since your time here seems to predate your blog.
Everything about what you've said indicates to me that you are not here for self promotion. If you did register here and take part for a long time before even introducing the idea of a blog, specifically with the intention to infiltrate and self promote, then you have done such a superlatively good job at integrating that you deserve to self promote.
Something that I'm wondering is, how far can this be generalized? Let's say someone who just created their account after someone gave them an invite happens to already maintain their own blog as a general longform thoughts repository, and looks over the text and link post options to start sharing content. Would it be reasonable for them to follow that same chain of thought and conclude "Wait, I already post things I want to share on my blog, I might as well write an article on my blog and link to that back to Tildes instead"? With reputation one way or the other not established, this reasoning doesn't strike me as any less valid than for a known good faith user.
One of the guiding principles of Tildes is to trust users and punish abusers. There also isn't a specific set of rules or guidelines, because when people outline specifically what is "abuse" of a rule, then people will do everything up to what is abuse. For example, if there were a rule where you could post one personal article per group per week, there would be people who would get right up to the edge of the rule. Instead, there are guidelines that encourage people to participate in good faith, and leave it to people to figure out exactly what that means.
There's a bit of "I know it when I see it" to the approach to how people share what they have made here. Spammers are pretty rare, and they get brought up, chatted with, and then dealt with accordingly. Because of this approach, there isn't really a generalization other than, in general, each case is individually evaluated.
For the specific case that you've brought up, generally it would be suggested for people to take part in discussions before posting a lot of their own content, but I think that generally Tildes is relatively welcoming to people posting their long form thoughts.
This reminds me of the rule-following paradox - Wittgenstein argued a rule could never describe its own correct application. One may specify a rule in any amount of detail, but there will always be an infinite number of ways to misinterpret it.
In fact, when we know a rule, it isn’t because we have figured out it’s correct use down to every last details, but rather we just know the rule.
I think a Wittgensteinian would be very impressed by Tildes moderation policy. Of course there a plenty of good reasons why larger sites can’t use this approach and instead just deem a user to be abusing if they make more than so many posts per hour, or just use a machine learning model, but for a small community like Tildes it’s great to just be able to say “don’t be bad, if you’re bad we’ll ban ya” because at the end of the day bad actors know who they are and it’s relatively obvious to a human (if not a machine).
Guidelines are still great of course - if someone is accidentally behaving in an unacceptable manner, then they can be very useful to course correct. And this is exactly what Wittgenstein says - when we give a definition for a rule, it is to clarify a mistake.
That's in line with what I'd expect. Relevantly, I think a significant part of what brought the issue up as pointed out here is that this self-promotion policy feels like it constitutes a "rule" (we don't want you to share your content if you don't also share other things) which doesn't actually exist. I don't think anyone would have a problem with a hypothetical user whose topics are only about their original content so long as they're otherwise engaging with the community in a genuine manner across their subjects of interest and aren't flooding the topic list with a deluge of links to their work, or whatever else constitutes improper behavior with regards to sharing content. We as a community are in agreement that OC isn't inherently a problem, but it would be good to make sure the code of conduct makes it clearer IMO, because right now it could easily be interpreted otherwise (granted, sample of size of 2, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to read it that way given that some spaces do in fact intentionally curtail sharing original content)
Does the new user comment on posts that are not their own blog?
Does the new user continue to comment on their own articles, furthering the conversation on Tildes without linking back to their blog?
A known user has earned the good faith approach, an unknown user has not. An invite is an invite to participate, not to self promote.
You wouldn't walk into a room at a party and expect people already having a conversation to just head into another room to listen to you talk, you gotta get engaged with them first.
With the way the self-promotion policy is written, I think the idea is that you could exclusively post your blog posts as topics on Tildes, but you're still expected to participate in comment sections and otherwise be an active user. Like posting your own blog posts shouldn't be literally the only thing you do on the site. You're expected to write comments too (on your own topics or those posted by others).
But honestly though, I've come to think the self-promotion policy is poorly written, vague, and honestly just quite discouraging in a way that has been terrible for the site. I would love to see it changed.
Like, I do not care if someone only uses their Tildes account to post updates about the game they're developing, or the music they're making, so long as they interact with the responses their topics receive.
I'd love to see that specific policy rewritten, to make it clear that "using" Tildes to exclusively post your own creations is fine, but "self-promoters" are "obligated" to participate in discussions on their topics, not just "post and run". It's like, a "contractual" agreement. In exchange for being able to share your own creations on Tildes, you are expected to participate in the discussions they generate.
I really don't like the terms "self-promoters", "obligated", and "contractual" though. They feel about as hostile as the current policy, so I'm not exactly sure how I would rewrite the current self-promotion policy, but I absolutely think it should be rewritten.
Because frankly, the way that policy is written right now (and the way some users have been reminded of it in the past) feels hostile. It feels like posting your own content could be against the rules, and that's enough to have a massive discouraging effect on people sharing their own creations here (this topic itself is a good example).
But I think Tildes is "at its best" when people are sharing and discussing the things they create. This site desperately needs more of that, and I think this policy is getting in the way.
IMHO, if all someone ever submits here is their own content, and only ever interacts in those submissions, I think that absolutely crosses the line into spam territory, and so should be strongly discouraged.
I feel like that is directed at me, since I am pretty much the only person that points other users towards to the self-promotion rule whenever I spot that they have posted their own content and little else besides that. I don't feel like I've ever been hostile about it though. Here is what I generally write as a comment in those situations:
However, if you feel that actually is hostile in some way, I am certainly open to suggestions for rewording it to be less so. I think the warning is worth providing though, since Deimos has banned users in the past for repeatedly posting only their own content, and not participating very much on the site besides that.
Going over it again, that part of my comment:
Reads more critical than I intended.
In fact, let's drop "hostile" as the adjective to describe the policy, and instead use "discouraging".
I'd say the way the policy is written is discouraging. Of course it is. That's the point. It's to discourage, via explanation, people from purely using Tildes to post their own content.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think the policy feels too discouraging (I'm just going off vibes here).
Too discouraging, to the point that I think it's difficult to remind other people about the policy, without the reminder itself, regardless of how it is written, being its own source of discouragement, because of the how discouraging the policy itself feels.
So I didn't mean to say that you (and the like, two other people I've ever seen remind someone about that policy) were yourself being hostile/discouraging, but rather that the policy just isn't something that can be shared/reminded of in a way that feels purely nice or friendly.
Like, it's a rule, right? You're reminding someone of a rule, and to me, the natural reaction to being reminded of a rule is to feel like I broke that rule and that feels bad.
So I guess that's the core of what I'm trying to get at?
Anyways, you're great, appreciate you, hope the new house is coming together well!
Fair enough. And I can see your point now, with "hostile" swapped to "discouraging". Hostile makes it sounds like I was actively trying to attack people for simply sharing things they created, which was never my intent... and it's likely not the intent of the policy either.
If I properly understood what you mean, the issue with the policy isn't that it's discouraging by itself (it should be as this policy represents the guardrail against advertisers who would exploit the community for their own gain and without contributing back, and I wholeheartedly agree there is no place for them on Tildes), but that the wording makes it seems like the behaviors this policy targets might be broader than they need to be.
Add to that the fact that being told you're breaking a rule naturally feels bad assuming you care about the community you were told you broke the rules of, and the intended target of this policy being advertisers, and you end up with a reminder of it indicating that you're straying away from the code of conduct potentially being taken not as a request to keep in mind what the community strives for (and act accordingly), but as being accused of being equivalent to an advertiser... Which as far as Tildes is concerned seems to rank somewhere around the level of being told you set fire to a public library. This factor might be what makes this policy feel overly harsh in a way others wouldn't.
off-topic aside
Unrelated but I hope the full edit logs aren't available to anyone other than Deimos because it took a shamefully large amount of them to fix all the grammar or outright syntax mistakes that slipped in while I was writing this. Typically this happens when I get too tired.The wording seems fine (putting aside the policy itself which as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread I believe should be reworded), but I could see the combined effect of explicit ping + copying a rule in full + bringing up the possibility of getting banned resulting in what you presumably just intend to be a friendly reminder from a fellow member to be misinterpreted as a formal warning from the administration (even if you aren't actually an admin nor pretending otherwise) which feels a lot more brutal (especially since Tildes being invite-only makes getting banned more significant than it would be on an open registration website).
I don't think there even is something wrong in particular that should be addressed with this approach, because all three parts are definitely needed if you think a user is straying from the code of conduct and needs a reminder, it might be just an unavoidable issue with how to approach someone who is breaking the rules.
EDIT, as I realized I completely forgot to address the first point: I do agree that someone who is active just inside their own threads that are just about their original content (or for that matter even if it's about sharing something else) would be out of line. However, I don't believe anyone who signs up with the objective of interacting in good faith with the community would realistically do that. Even if this hypothetical user has a justifiable reason to consider their original content to be the only type of content they have to offer to the community (say, almost all of their other hobbies and the media they consume are so niche they rightfully deem the Tildes userbase wouldn't appreciate it) they would still organically end up interacting in discussions and start some of their own through topics started by the other members, which is fine in my book. Which brings back my issue of feeling that the policy's wording could easily be interpreted as putting the emphasis on an arbitrary distinction between balancing sharing OC and non-OC content rather than the actual concern of genuinely interacting with the community (vs just seeing Tildes as free traffic to funnel to your own content).
Yeah, I think discouraging that sort of behavior is the intent of the self-promotion policy. But if it doesn't make that clear then perhaps it does need to be reworded a bit.
The policy does feel ill-worded to me, although that's probably mostly a product of the advertising industry perverting the very concept of sharing to the point that communities wanting to protect themselves against the all-consuming marketing machine feel the need to word a policy toward that goal with a heavy hand, if only to preempt obvious bad faith arguments that a more reasonably worded policy would technically not cover.
Also, I have a tendency to overanalyze things way beyond what's reasonable, and ultimately I was already pretty sure I was in the clear before posting this topic. I'd be very surprised if someone sharing my concern genuinely gave up on sharing original content because of the policy's wording.
Still, if there's a more accurate way to represent the spirit of this policy I agree that it would help or at least not hurt to rewrite it accordingly. Perhaps something like the following:
I feel this covers the intent while not implying that the fact you created something you wish to share might inherently be problematic rather than the reason and method you do so being detrimental to Tildes.
EDIT: reworded awkward phrasing
What about something like this? Trying to boil things down and take a little more from the original. As well as put the important qualifiers before anything that says OC is "allowed." Might come across as more firm, maybe because of shortening/rewording sentences.
YMMV, but to me the "allowed in moderation" seems superfluous given that the proportion of OC to non-OC content doesn't really matter to us. What does is that one should actively communicate with the members when sharing content, OC or not, instead of, for example, treating the "post topic" as a megaphone to promote it and proceeding to leave without interacting with the community until they have something else to promote. I'd go as far as to replace it with "encouraged" per my original wording (...and probably reword the beginning so that "encouraged" doesn't appear in two consecutive sentences. "You are encouraged to" to "You should", maybe?). Sure, that doesn't cover posting too much content at once, flooding the topic list, but that is just as much of an issue with original content as everything else, so I wouldn't consider it within the scope of the self promotion policy.
That aside, I do like this version, it's more concise and conveys the important points.
Yeah I actually added that in because it was a parenthetical in the original. I felt that if it was important enough to slip in, it might be better to retain it. Mostly to cover the bases if spamming happens.
Basically, I tried to stay away from too much prescriptive language, and a little more on vibes/productive discussion. While keeping it as short as possible.
I say that rather than creating loooooong text posts, you could link to your blog with your loooooong text and give us summary. Like what other people (and sometimes myself) do with ie. news websites.
And if you attach info that the blog you are linking to is yours and you link there specifically because you don't want to do lon post here, I'm ok with this.
You can see it as self-promotion, but I suppose you post it here because you want to discuss it or see how others view the thing you write about thus sparking relatable discussion here, which is what we want - discuss.
I think linking to a personal blog is important for sharing things that can't be shared here eg images, interactive javascript, etc. I've submitted a couple things to reddit that got taken down because it linked to my site, and the reason given was "no self-promotion." Aside from the fact I'm not selling anything, how else am I supposed to share things like a little NFL game I made?
I like that this community is more chill about it. I've enjoyed the discussions on things I've shared here.
I don't know what the fine line of "too much" would be - from how I view the looser administration style here, I have a feeling that's at the level of consistent complaints and a lack of communication or awareness from you, or alongside something like unwelcome monitization or spreading hate. Which is obviously not the case.
Considering how we promote self-hosting on here, though, I think it'd be pretty hypocritical not to allow someone cross-posting their blog here if they want to open a conversation in this community.
We aren’t very good at judging the quality of our own work. If everyone posted their blogs, we would sadly have a lot of mediocre content. There also isn’t a downvote button on Tildes to help bury the junk.
Don’t get me wrong, I have my own website and would love to post to my blog, but I also moderate on reddit and would hate to face so much spam (and it’s only a matter of time before it gets out of hand). On r/indiedev so many little indie developers think they are working on the next big thing, but most of it gets downvoted to oblivion.
I would love to have the possibility to post to my own blog, but with specific site-wide rules or mechanisms on how to do it so that my content is easy to ignore for others. It can’t be a max posting rule because its the number of individual bloggers that will increase exponentially, not one blogger’s writing powers.
I am personally a big fan of giving users more filtering power. This could be a simple checkmark list up top: a checkbox as an OC tag filter to include content made by the poster and check boxes for link and text submissions. Three checkboxes.
On larger scale social media and especially in the context of Reddit where people with the same interests are corralled into the same discussion space to compete over the reader's limited attention, driving otherwise levelheaded people to try and drag the proverbial spotlight toward themselves over anyone else at all costs (which as far as Reddit is concerned is a feature, not a bug), I agree this is a major concern. And while the upvote/downvote mechanic is arguably itself part of the problem, things would definitely be even worse without it. On Tildes, where the userbase is kept at a more manageable scale and encouraged to value content quality and discussion instead of molding it into whatever makes the engagement metric numbers the biggest, I think we can afford to let the website's layout and userbase self-regulate without having to cover every vector of attack from a bad actor (but still keep them in mind to curtail individual instances of abuse of the implicit trust in the structure should it occur)
To pick a more concrete example of what I have in mind, since the website strives for discussion-provoking content without limiting the scope of what the content can be about (while we do have groups to sort submissions as a first pass before tags, they add up to most conceivable topics, and their purpose isn't to function as self-contained communities like subreddits might, lowering the "competing for attention" effect), and combined with the smaller scale, people's instinctive reaction when they have something to share that might be considered "not worthy" of a dedicated topic would be to seek out or create one about a broader subject, gathering enough interest for discussion where the content the author wanted to share (OC or not) has its place. And with it established as the norm for "minor" submissions for the lack of a better term, outliers will be reminded to prefer this approach over just posting a random link to something.
Since the layout of the website already primes people to engage in discussion as sub-units of broader threads, members who have a blog of their own (and this can be extrapolated to OC as a whole) would most likely only consider the "write blog article instead of text post, link article back to tildes" route if they truly believe the underlying subject warrants a dedicated thread, dampening the issue of everyone starting to flood the topic list with their own blog posts (the quality of the content itself is a concern, but so long as most users operate under the premise that the priority is sparking discussion, not be praised for what they made, the temptation to "be in the spotlight" that other social media cultivates shouldn't escalate out of control). A feature to process OC as part of the filters could be useful (and for that matter I approve of more granular user-side content filtering in general), but overall I think Tildes is already pretty resilient against the issues this is meant to help solving.
Personally I'm fine with it. I could see it becoming an eventual problem at some point due to the quantity and quality of posts. But for now all the ones I've seen have either been interesting or easily ignored.
If it's something worth posting I don't think it matters if the op wrote it.
I broadly agree with the other comments - putting your words on your site and posting that to Tildes has a lot of overlap with an actual text post. But, one advantage of Tildes is its very clean reading interface and lack of annoyances (modals, floating buttons, etc). So if your personal blog is on Medium or something annoying to read, then there would be a good reason to post here directly instead of linking out. It doesn't seem like the case for your blog, but would be an issue with someone's blog.
Another argument for writing a site you control and posting it here is that you get to retain the words you write. Some people describe that as POSSE: "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere".
A while ago, I tried to make a searchable collection of everything I'd written online (across Reddit, HN, Tildes, lobse.rs, etc). Sometimes I want to refer back to something I said or remember a link that I shared, which is hard to do across sites and without great search / filtering. This has proved surprisingly tricky to do! So by writing on your own site first, you keep a full record of what you've written (and then we can all comment on it here). So I think broadly, I'm for it!
I opened being able to export/dump my Tildes contributions as a feature request on GitLab, but it hasn't gotten any traction: tildes/tildes#825.
FWIW, I'm planning to do the opposite. Take my "greatest hits" comments and expand them into blog posts. This will require additional writing to capture the relevant context around my comments to make them into a whole thought.
For me my Tildes posts are a way to hone and clarify my ideas. Seeing how people respond helps me see how the ideas are received, understand if there are flaws in my thought process or gaps in my knowledge, see if there's an even better idea. So I think a post at the end of the discussion will be a better post than one i would write at the beginning.
I think that's fair too! I think in both cases, Tildes readers will be able to read what you write with minimal fuss.
My general opinion as a vaguely reddit mod is if it's...
...not a big deal.
If on the other hand it's you trying to get views on your shitty digital nomad travel blog, then I'm gonna be irritated...more specifically, especially if you obviously have no idea about the country/culture of the place you are writing about and are just restating what every tourist says within the first few days of landing in the given country.
I was unaware there was such a trend but given the specificity of your example I assume you're speaking from past experience encountering it?
In any case, I can confidently promise the latter won't ever be the case for me... if only because I have stepped outside of my home country a grand total of once in my life.
Haha, yeah the last part was very specific. Basically any country sub-reddit has to deal with a lot of tourist and digital nomad posts, and it gets old fast.
Imagine almost daily posts about how amazing The Eiffel Tower/London Bridge/Angkor Wat was. It gets old for people who are from that country (or just live there).
Especially in cheaper CoL countries there are a lot of digital nomads who try to spam their very mediocre blogs to make money to pay for their travels.
Ha. No shade on anyone wishing to monetize their content as long as they're not annoying about it, but if anything this blog is costing me money through the hardware it's running on, and if/when I get around to it so will a dedicated domain name (at least the electricity consumption impact of a raspberry pi is negligible, I'm pretty sure the HDD enclosure hooked up to it for storage is drawing more power than the computer itself).
It seems in line with the spirit of moderation here, and other users have been welcomed to do so in the past. If everything posted on your blog ended up here as a link post, that wouldn't be bad, but it might rub someone the wrong way.
Just a question: why not post the content of the linked page as a text post, and add a preface that it was written for your blog, with a link? For any given text post, I could see some number of tilders who would appreciate it simply not engaging if it had meant opening an external link. The ownership of posts here are retained by the user. At least to my sense of justice, it isn't any more "promotional" either way.
I think this would be best. I've read a few of these posts where I didn't even realize till later that the op wrote it
That would definitely work for this purpose as far as I can tell. Regarding the concern of needing to open an external link to read the content, that is the second reason I intended to accompany a given link post with a copy of the article as a comment under a collapsible box (so it doesn't needlessly take space for those who don't mind reading it from the blog while still allowing to read it without leaving Tildes). As for why not the reverse as suggested:
Still, these are minor details and I don't think it would matter that much either way.
That makes sense! Thanks for explaining those deciding factors. I assumed that you'd thought of the option, and was just curious about your reasons.
Minor or not, essay writing is self-expression, so if linking the posts seems better to you, it probably is.