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.
@rodrigo One more thing I have realized is that I now realize is that you have the tendency to create a post and then basically not check back on it for a while. For example, you are asking a question here, several people have replied and 12 hours later there is not a single comment from you. I don't expect people to be glued to tildes once they make a post and reply to every single thing. But no replies at all when a post still is "fresh" does increase the feeling of "hit and run" posting.
I'm a “slow web” guy, hehe. Also, PHP shit yesterday took a chunk of my time, and… life happens. I do always return (as you can see), but can't commit to access Tildes every day :/
That's valid as well, it is why tried to frame it as the impression some of it might give rather than framing it as something that is wrong. It could still be an idea then to leave a little comment. At the very least saying this to shape perception a bit better.
On the other hand, I don't feel making it an obligation to comment and interact is the way to go, since it's more likely to make posting feels like a burden and so people less willing to post in general.
Something different in an online space than offline is there's no obligation to do anything, at least not really. If there are rules about having to do this and that, it's always easier to just not do it, and don't interact anymore than to change behavior. Especially when for the average user, an online forum is just a website that they visit occasionally to pass the time and on a volutary basis, there's no financial or social consequences for not participating.
I suspect in online spaces, rules work more as a user filtering mechanism than coercing behavioral changes. It doesn't seem like a problem on Reddit because there're just so many users so for each subreddit user loss isn't a problem. For a small community like us, retention is important. Of course this goes the other way too, if others feel the impression of self promotion puts them off then that's also something to accomodate for.
If there has to be "rules" or maybe guidelines, they need to be geared toward encouragement rather than prohibition somehow. Something that everyone can be happy with, but not a big deal to ignore. Easier said than done of course, hmm.
Perhaps this is true for posting links in general. However, for posting your own work, I think engaging with the Tildes community by posting a blurb (why this is worth your time) is a reasonable expectation. If I were to post my own work on Tildes, I would want the discourse and the engagement with the community I enjoy.
Add on to what you said, the underlying motivation is to talk to others as normal human beings, and not just as a source of audience.
Otherwise we could just end up with a bunch of cursory "I like this a lot, let me know what you think" which doesn't really add anything except more busywork.
That's not really a "on the other hand" but either me not making it clear or you somewhat misreading what I said. I am not saying it should be an obligation, but without such a discussion starter combined with the other context I can see where people are coming from. Maybe put more clearly, the overall lack of participation by OP in discussions (even ones they did start themselves as this very post) can create a feeling of them operating outside the community rather than part of the community.
I guess my sympathy lean a bit more toward OP on this. I know you didn't mean it as a rule, but when it's what many people suggested (which I think is good intentioned but not without negative effect), it still creates a social pressure.
Participation I can take or leave. From our perspective, we take our time to give OP a comment so it's understandable to feel left hanging when the OP doesn't reply with at least one comment. But from their perspective, they're inundated by many people and (by this expectation) equally many demands for conversation. I feel we don't appreciate this enough but to be able to hold several convserations at once is unnatural and a skill on its own. In another comment I said OPs should treat people not like an audience but unfortunately the way this branching comment system work is the OP is always forced to treat others like an audience. Ironically, it's natural human behavior to just reply to whoever you happen to have things to reply to, and it's an influencer-type skill to be able to talk to so many people at once, without them sounding trites. The request we're making here is, in effect, asking OPs to cater to our needs like an audience. If that's something you as the OP aspire toward, great! the community will be more lively for it. But if you don't feel like having the energy for it, it's also fine, we all contribute however we can. Treating others like normal people go both ways.
Sometimes I think people forget that posting anything (links, topics, comments) requires works. For me personally, the fact that anyone has taken the time to do it at all is valuable enough. The only issue is whether it's spam, which can be dealt with by reporting to the mods and let him make the judgement.
Personally when OP doesn't reply to me specifically that's alright. But when OP doesn't reply to anyone, even in a post where they ask for perspective it does give an impression of disinterest in the topic even if that is not intended.
In this case it feels like OP is aggregating the result of a discussion rather than being part of the discussion. In the case of their own blog posts it more or less can give an impression of driving traffic rather than genuinely being interested in the topic they have written about.
And to be clear, I feel like you are tackling it more broadly where I am responding the context of how I see OP specifically operate on this website. It is somewhat less as part of the community and more along side it and people are clearly picking up on that and giving that as feedback to OP.
Yeah, that impression is fair. I think I'm just more okay with it. I trust that OP still reads and votes on our comments like usual. They made this post to be about the larger topic and be okay with offering them up as a case study so I'm willing to believe they still care. Like how the admin barely participates in our discussions at all but the fact whatever cetificate issue yesterday was handled quickly to me showed he still cares too.
I think your interpretation is very kind, but the logic is confusing to me. If someone makes a blog and shares it, presumably the point is to engage in discussion, or else it would just be a personal diary. If the engagement was too overwhelming, I can't imagine they would make a blog (and then post a link to it to a small community for discussion) in the first place.
I don't have strong feelings at the moment on the issue, but I do agree that if someone wants to put their own content up, either make it a text post or disclose upfront that it's a link to your own work. I personally find it a bit odd when people ask for advice and then make no further comments, but I try to respect that they may be thinking through various options and aren't in the frame of mind to engage. There are better conversations though if OP engages after the initial post.
I think it's normal to just want to read others' replies or reactions, no? That's how I go with most of my posts. If I have to reply they'd just be variations of "thank you for sharing", which gets repetitive after a while. Though if that's what people prefer I can do it more often :)
Edit: agree that better conversations tend to happen when OP (at least me) replies. People have shared surprising things when I asked follow-up (so rodrigo you could consider). I try to do it when I can, but feels like a lot to ask everyone to do the same.
I imagine differently. At some point, when something I wrote goes viral, I give up following every reply. It's overwhelming, and I have my issues (being a neurodivergent, can't keep up with many people talking at the same time, in person and online). I like to think that a thought or an article of mine sparked a good discussion, even beyond the point I participate in the said discussion.
My general impression from seeing many of these posts (and generally not interacting with them because of the appearance of self promotion) is that these posts could be better handled through syndication?
For example, by making them text posts on Tildes with the full text of the post, with a link to your original blog post at the top or bottom. That makes it clear that you wrote it yourself and are invested in discussing the topic with Tildes.
Longer text posts are usually well-received here, especially if they lead to interesting discussions; though the points about self promotion ratios are probably still relevant.
I agree with you, if they were long self posts I think people would see them differently. I can understand wanting to format more extensively than markdown allows one to and therefore wanting to have it on ones own website. But as you suggest having the full text with the link at the top with a note saying "hey I'm posting the text here but I have a version at this link with the formatting I intended it to have" seems like a good compromise?
I see places like Tildes as a hub for blogs and web things, too. I really don't bother opening a new tab to read something. It's nice to the person who maintain a website in this platformed internet era.
I run a “Tildes-like” in pt_BR, called Órbita. Over there, we incentivize people to share their stuff. There are so little places to share what you make; I don't want to become yet another Meta platform, allergic to links.
People tend to ignore what they see as too much self-promoting, so the topic falls pretty fast. (And our user base is even smaller than Tildes'.)
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.
I would also like to say, as a way to not discourage people from sharing their writing in fear of criticism: I shared a small piece of fiction on here that was rightfully criticized and appreciated at the same time, and someone (a professional voice narrator/actor) who is a fellow user sent me a link out of the blue of them narrating my short story since they enjoyed it so much. (He also said he felt like a shakespearean eminem (iirc) while reading it, which was one of the highest compliments I had ever received on my writing).. This may have been the greatest interaction I have ever had with someone online, and I think of it fondly, often.
Please, share the work you are proud of here! That one person was just rather antagonistic (and deserved the ban), but they were the exception, we love seeing user created and original work here - just don't make it the core of your time in the community.
I don’t really pay attention to the blog posts but what caught my attention was that he titled the post “To Those Who Can’t Read” and I had never seen someone schizoposting on here before.
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.
Total posts for last six month or so: 49
Manual do Usuário posts: 21
Percentage: 43%
In the past six months you've posted your blog about every week or so. Is this a bit too much? Maybe a bit. Are you cross posting every blog article that you write to Tildes? Are you doing it because you want some link juice, or you want agreement, or you want criticism, or you want a discussion about the topic?
Maybe it is some combination of two or three of those. I don't want to discourage you from posting on Tildes but maybe you could post 3rd party links a bit more? If it's your blog then you have a bit more weight in the discussion (as your opinion is the topic) which isn't always fair... but sometimes it is right to post your blog instead of a comment. I don't think we should ban your blog--it's easy to ignore if we don't want to read it this week.
Maybe percentage is not an issue for people but frequency is?--If you linked your site every day I think people would appreciate it less. If you linked to your site once or twice per month people would still know your blog exists. I don't think you post too often but it does seem a bit of a borderline case.
When judging others it helps me to think about myself doing the same action. Personally, I'd be a bit scared to post my own blog post to Tildes. Maybe I lack confidence or don't feel I could put something coherent together which would be interesting for a broad number of people to read. The french have a word: egoist. On the other hand... if everyone is scared to share then all we see on Tildes are virtual tumbleweeds (which Deimos would need to program in--as a new feature!--to maintain the same level of user retention). So some vanity is useful in the world and it is not all bad. I like reading your blog every now and then! But the topic of your writing is not always interesting so I don't always read it--and that is perfectly fine.
Interesting! I guess we see our writings and opinions in a different light. I don't think that because it's a post of mine, my opinion has more weight. On the contrary: I submit posts here (and elsewhere) to be challenged, to have good discussions. That's the main driver for me to write. If I wish nobody read me, I'd be writing a journal.
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 think you're perfectly fine and probably the silent majority never had any issue whatsoever with any of your postings.
I think making a single post or two asking for playtesters would go over fine.
You’re not really self-promoting if you’re not even linking to something, just asking for an interest check. IMO your post would be analogous to a “single post, just me TiMaSoMo update” which I think would be fine to do (once or twice, not weekly or daily).
And I think then if, multiple months or a year later you posted “Yo remember that game I asked for playtesters for, it’s out now” would also be fine. Again, as long as it wasn’t the only thing you’re ever posting or commenting about.
If you’re active here in comments, just not posting topics, you’re probably fine (at least in my book).
Edit: And if that still felt too self-promote-y for you, you could just post about it in the weekly(?) topic about technical projects people are working on or games that people are playing.
I don't know if you're abusing the rule or not but you have been posting your blog frequently enough that I personally have decided to filter it out of my feed. (I'm just one person though and most likely not your intended audience, so take that for what it's worth.)
I don't think you are anywhere near the worst offenders, the people whose behaviour makes having that rule necessary. I don't think you need to fear getting banned or anything like that. However, the reason I'm active on Tildes is that people share extremely valuable and/or interesting content on here. Especially for link topics, someone just posting their own blog doesn't really fit that idea. I see link topics as reading recommendations and recommending your own content is superfluous: of course you would recommend it, otherwise you wouldn't have written it in the first place. In my opinion the recommendation to read should come from someone else who loved it enough to post a link. And I know that's an extremely high bar to clear, but that high bar is the reason why I'm on Tildes.
In fairness I should add that I also dislike it when people post links to content that is mostly or entirely advertising - for example blogs or tweets about AI, written by some big AI company. Although this meets the above requirement of someone being enough of a fanboy of someone else's content that they take it upon themself to post a link, it's still disappointing all the same. Those posts are more palatable if the person at least took the time to explain why they found the content worth posting and perhaps included some quotes that make it easier for me to evaluate whether or not I want to click and read. Usually I don't, but I haven't felt the need to erase these from my feed because it's easy enough to weigh each case individually without clicking out of Tildes.
We have a
press releasestag. It gets applied to posts where press release is mentioned in the copy header or the link itself.Yeah it is the sort of uncritical techbro stuff we can do without.
There's a Grand Theft Auto VI Launch Trailer post on the front page right now. I have no problems with it of course, but I think that is closer to an advertisement than the Anthropic research paper on self-replication. Both are self-serving, but the GTA one is closer to convincing you to buy something today than the Anthropic one is.
Just tried and I think the filter works for both. If I'm not mistaken the point of having nested tags like that is for use cases like this.
That's totally fair and I'm ok with it :)
I like reading some of your blog posts, and I think your comments paint you as a contributor rather than a drive-by marketer. However, your posting patterns feel artificial. It's very often 1 article yours, 1 article something else and it's very consistently like this. That left, and continues to leave, this feeling in the back of my mind that the other topics you submit are motivated by the fact that we're not supposed to self-promote. People don't like being tricked.
If you did stop posting, this site would become even quieter and I'm sure your presence would be missed. It's a conundrum, huh?
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.
I look at it through the lens of 'what if everyone did this?' instead of self-posts, and while that's a bit of an extreme and not realistic scenario for a small site like this, I think it does highlight the base issue of the activity even if it's not very apparent on a smaller scale. If everyone were posting their ideas on a blog and then linking that here instead of just posting it here, it does send a different message than if you post it here where the intention is that this is your intended audience and it was meant for people here. There's a bit more community behind it. Now perhaps your blog post is meant for people beyond Tildes and of course that would be the natural and obvious thing for a publicly available blog, but then that is where I think it highlights a level of impersonal nature to it if everyone were to do that.
Of course, even if everyone were doing this in moderation, perhaps it would still feel that way, I'm not sure, so I'm not saying it's the definitive perspective on the matter. Since it's sort of at self-moderation scenario if Deimos isn't around to set strict limits then I don't know if there's a super solid answer.
Personally, for me this scenario would've been awesome! Imagine that: everyone having their own blog, posting on the web, away from siloed platforms.
And I don't think the community would be harmed. The discussions still would happen here, and that's what glue ourselves together.
if everybody had this rate and the near-absence of interaction, the site would be ruined. so yes, too much.
if you do continue to post, give a summary and be active in the thread. if you can’t do that, wait until you can or just don’t bother with that one.
there have been people over the years who posted a lot of their own stuff. the keys are curation and participation; not just a pump and dump.
I haven't posted, or linked to my own writing here on Tildes for several reasons, but mostly because the majority of my works are longer formats: novels and one novella. I have considered sending copies to members here if they are interested, but I feel a little awkward about promoting them.
All my completed stories are sci-fi adventure tales. If that fits your tastes, and you'd like to give me a bit of feedback, I'd be happy to send a free copy of what I consider my best novel so far. Send me a personal message.