Policy on self promotion?
I'm sure occasional self promoted content is actually fine (asking for feedback on music, games, etc), but I've been a part of several subreddits that had to implement rules where you had to split 50/50 linking to your own content and participating in the community (non link comments). This was to curb people from ONLY posting links to their own youtube videos and nothing else. Content itself was fine, usually, but as you can probably tell, smaller subreddits didn't like being treated as ad spaces for youtubers that didn't contribute anything else. It's not a big deal for larger communities, but a real one for niche ones.
How does tildes expect to deal with this? Is it even an issue? Was this discussed (couldn't find any threads by skimming)?
I do not think there is a percentage based rule. Tildes policy at the moment is you can be a person with a website/product/youtube channel, but you cannot be the website/product/channel.
Edit: /rule/policy/
I like this way of doing things. Where was this policy posted?
That's taken directly from reddit:
Where did you get that from? I can't find it in the Terms of Use or the Code of Conduct or the FAQ or any of the official documents.
I remember @Demios saying it somewhere. Rule is probably overstating it. Perhaps I should change it to policy?
I think there's a balance that needs to be found. If a subreddit normally has threads with many people commenting, but when you post your original content you never get any comments, then it's likely to be spam.
I think that content becomes spam when nobody bothers to respond. This depends on the context though, for example you can go on /r/devblogs. A lot of people post their articles, but barely anyone ever comments. This isn't really a spammed subreddit because it's just the way it works over there. There's a lot of quality articles, but the people likely to read them won't discuss much. And for the most part, people talk to each others using other means.
I do prefer it when it's the original creator that posts their content. On Reddit, content is regarded as higher quality when it's posted by "friends", or outsiders, which sounds weird to me. I hope we can do better here.
I'd say it should be on a case by case. On one hand, it's a good idea to have content producers that aren't scared about posting, on the other hand, too much content can swamp a community and that's when a 50/50 rule makes sense.
I have posted to groups where nobody ever responded to my postings so at some point I asked if anybody cared at all. A few people responded and told me that they enjoyed my articles but sometimes there is nothing to add.
On the other hand, I once had a reddit account and had postings with 50+ follow-ups deleted, because one guy complained to the moderators about my postings being "advertising".
So, I'm not sure about the "no comments equals spam" rule.
That being said, I really would like to see clear rules regarding self-promotion!
I think this is where it becomes a good idea to use the vote feature. Also on Reddit, we can see the view count. This helps see if people are at least checking the content out.
Votes completely discourage me from writing in the long run. I'd rather post into a vacuum than look at votes.
So you're saying that if people vote on your stuff, you will stop writing?
Yes. If I see votes on my stuff, I will stop writing at some point.
That seems counter intuitive. Especially if you're posting on a community website like this one where the voting system is how the community can give immediate feedback about what content they value the most.
If you stop writing when people vote for you, you're pretty much saying that as soon as it's valuable to other people, that's when you stop.
Maybe you don't like fame, but getting some hit articles doesn't imply becoming famous.
I grew up with Usenet where feedback was given by agreeing or disagreeing in a follow-up article. Voting is a bad thing, IMHO, because (a) it encourages quick and thoughtless feedback and (b) because it gives a deceptive "value" to the things people post. I sometimes read the grey (downvoted) posts on HackerNews or scroll down to the bottom of a thread and more than often, there are quite interesting things there.
Also, I reject the assumption that votes signal that my contributions are valuable to people. The number of votes depends on such a lot of things that are completely unrelated to the matter of the articles being voted upon: position in the thread, time of day, age of the thread, length of the article, etc.
All in all the number of upvotes an article of mine gets is confusing at best, but discouraging most of the time. It is more or less a random number that is assigned to your posting and pretends to reflect some "value".
(Edit: embarrassing grammar, was in a hurry.)
So the actions of other users determines if my post is spam?
Within the context of a community, I'd say that it does. When you post content in the right place so that the right people see it, if it has value to them, they should interact with it. It's not always the case, but it should still be true. I mean sure there are other factors that might determine if your content gets ignored or not, but I feel like that's a good rule of thumb.