Does Tildes welcomes “self-promoting” links to personal blog posts?
I share some posts from my blog here, and almost all of them have a meta-discussion regarding “self-promotion”. The latest prompted me to bring up a proper meta-discussion on the subject.
Tildes' Code of Conduct says:
If you have your own site/project/channel/etc. that you'd like to share on Tildes, that's generally fine (in moderation), but it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site. Tildes is a community, not a free advertising platform. Sharing your own content is welcome as long as you're involved in the community, but don't just treat Tildes as a source of an audience.
I guess we need to address what constitutes “moderation” and sharing one's own stuff as “primary reason”. Am I abusing this rule? If so, why? If not, what am I doing to avoid abusing it? (Using myself as a “control group” for the discussion; feel free to bring made up examples.)
As I said elsewhere, I like the discussions that happens here, try to engage in topics other than mine, and I share my blog posts candidly.
You link to the previous post. Where people mostly ask you to at least also post a comment with a little introduction to the blog post. Which, even if it isn't technically in the tildes guidelines seems like a nice thing to do anyway.
If we do look at what you quoted
And I do have a quick look at your profile every other submission you do is to your own blog. Your comments a majority of them seem to be related to submissions you made yourself and then mostly (but not entirely) focused on your blog posts as well. So, from that perspective I can see why people feel like you are somewhat doing the self promotion thing.
But again, I get the feeling it is more related to overall participation and in this case "hit and run" type posting where you post the link but no submission statement. You can argue that a blog post stands on its own, but in that case you are just linking to one external source for the majority of posts.
People have done that. There was a guy who wrote fiction and then posted it here as a link to his blog. And then when people criticized his writing he wrote another piece attacking them and linked it again and then he was banned. So as long as you don’t do that you’ll probably be okay.
Honestly, I've always been in favor of "self-promotion" going by the reddit definition of it (and therefore I do not agree with rules that forbid or discourage it). Why not? Either the thing is worth reading or it isn't. Hacker News has good submissions (I've previously made my opinion of the comments there known) and many are self-submitted. The problem is that there is no mechanism for downvoting submissions here on tildes, and no moderator removing them, so I suppose it's important for everything to be well tagged so it can be filtered out by those who don't want to see it.
That aside, I upvoted the comment calling for you to provide a tildes-specific summary, earlier today. You can just do that...
I don't think it can be self-promoting when you're sharing an opinion and not promoting anything? On a link site, linking to your own blog post to share an opinion shouldn't count, unless you're just linking and not engaging in conversation.
Well, I'm promoting my own blog, in certain way. It has one sad ad that makes pennies per month. (Almost all of its revenue comes from the pt_BR edition). Still… I think I owned this disclosure.
Limiting self-promotion to 10% has been Deimos' preferred rule of thumb even from the reddit days. That generally includes both comments and submissions, though you probably shouldn't be submitting exclusively your own stuff.
You do actively participate elsewhere on the site, and while I don't always agree with your posts, I do think your submissions are within the threshold of acceptability. I don't wish to call out any specific names, but there are other members that are well above 10% self-promo and it hasn't been flagged as an issue yet.
As for leaving an introductory comment, this is something that I've noticed people arguing for in recent years, but I've never considered it a requirement or expectation. The title and tags communicate a lot of context already, and the core function of the site is to aggregate links after all. We shouldn't need to entice people to actually click said links.
I generally only find these introductory comments useful on video submissions, where it can be harder to get a sense of what the topic is. Though I recently discovered YouTube's AI summarizer feature, which offers a similar "at a glance" view.