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What are the rules on self-promotion? Can I share links to my own blog posts?
I admittedly didn't reread the docs, but a search for "self" showed no results.
EDIT
a search for "self-promotion", and not "self promotion", pointed me to this previous thread:
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/3i5/daily_tildes_discussion_approaches_to_self_promotion
There aren't any strict rules at this point. Overall, it should be fine as long as you do it in moderation and it doesn't seem to be your primary reason for interacting with the community. The guideline that I came up with long ago while moderating was something like: "it's fine to be a Tildes user with a website, but not to be a website with a Tildes account".
That is, if you're already involved with the community in other ways, it's totally fine to share your own content too, but people shouldn't just be treating Tildes as a source of an audience.
I think our policy should run along the lines of 'honesty in promotion'. If you've got something you're proud of, post about it and be open about it. Tag these as self.promotion. Don't spam it or try to astroturf. When in the future people inevitably break the honesty rule, that's a concrete benchmark for disciplinary action. People who are open and reasonable about it shouldn't have any issues. People who aren't interested can filter out the self.promo tag and not be bothered. One could also search on that tag and get a view of all the self-promo on the site, which is data that could be turned into interesting things down the road.
It's a hard problem... the signal to noise for self promo tends to go to hell once a place gets large and popular enough to be a 'target' where many eyes gather. There have to be some restraints.
That's entirely reasonable. Thanks!
That seems familiar somehow... ;)
Wasn’t Deimos the admin who wrote that for reddit?
I don't know who wrote that particular phrase in Reddit's former spam guidelines. But I know I quoted it a lot!
maybe tagging things with
self.promotionor something could be an intermediary solution? I remember your rule from Reddit days but for certain topics it becomes hard to adequately enforce since people repeatedly skirt limits.Self promotion is already being used.
I would love Reddit's old and extinct 10% guideline to be a Tildes rule.
Hard percentages aren't a great idea, IMO, as they may encourage promoters to post fluff to satisfy the ratio requirement. Almost any definable rule can be gamed, so I think it's better to have a clear and concise guiding principle and moderate accordingly.
There was a discussion sometime back regarding the lack of concreteness of certain rules, and Deimos had made a point that basically boils down to this. The problem with any concrete, well-defined rule is that you then have large swaths of users who will inevitably skirt around them and, when confronted, argue in bad faith that they never broke the letter of the rule, despite the clear and obvious intent. Better to be just clear enough about the rules to communicate a general class of prohibited behaviors, rather than spend your time arguing with assholes who will forever touch the ground on the other side of the white line with their hands because you told them they couldn't stand, walk, jog, run, or otherwise move or not move their feet in any way on the other side.
But we can ban fluff.
I believe we already have banned fluff!
Only if it can be identified as such and that's not straightforward at all except in the obvious cases.
Similarly, I've written a few small pieces of software - can I post about them in ~comp? I feel like I've seen a few posts about similar things before, but I'm not sure how well-received they were.
I for one would love to see what you've written :) Post away!
Yes, please! I second what Deimos said, and add that I love reading people's blogs and (cc @anowlcalledjosh) seeing people's pet projects, even if they're not useful to me immediately or ever.
I was curious about this topic myself. I hope a balance can be reached between "old reddit rules" (capital offence), and "new reddit rules" (spam is a-okay).
My general feeling is that self-promotion should be within-reason (not the exclusive reason for your account), and should always be disclosed as such.
I occasionally post some of my writing on here, but I don't spam it and it's always self-contained within the post (rather than just a link). Nobody's complained about it so far.