Self-promotion is seen on the internet as underhanded and suspicious but I really don’t mind it when it comes to creating links between communists. What’s the difference between self-promotion and other promotion? Submitting a link to your own work is bad, but asking your friend to do it is good? That doesn’t make any sense.
This is why I’ve been pro-self-promotion for years, and allow it in every community I’ve moderated as far back as antifastonetoss on Reddit. There we even worked with antifascist artists to promote their work on the subreddit.
The only limitation I would put on it is that you have to interact with the questions and comments to some extent. But that’s about it. This creates trust and is the basis of social media: interaction (it it only went one way then you’d act more like a TV or radio channel).
Stamping down on self-promotion only shows that you’re scared of being one-upped or eclipsed as a mod. We rarely have had issues with self-promotion, and if it helps other comrades boost their work, then that’s great.
Reddit is terrible for this. Most subreddits hate self-promotion of any kind and will remove your posts over it, or even ban you from the start. Why? Your community doesn’t care that someone posted their own work. They will open the post, comment and vote on it by themselves. Why do you need to be so controlling? It’s ludicrous to remove a post that has say 15 upvotes, signalling people like it, just because you want to control the flow of information in your subreddit.
I’ve honestly rarely had excesses. Excesses are hard to define but like I said, I do expect you interact at least a little bit with the community. This lets us know a little bit more about you and vet you organically. I’ve had on Discord a person who only wanted to recruit for their party and never interacted with anything outside of that. They would only talk about their party and post links to their newspaper, ignoring any question pinged to them that wasn’t about their party. That was fine for a long time and we didn’t really moderate on it either, but eventually other members started feeling like they were just using us and weren’t interested in the work we were doing. When we brought this up to them they simply stopped using the server but remained in it.
In this case yes it can feel suspicious, like you’re just using an existing community. But it also allowed us to learn more about their party and their work.
And we’ve had self-promoters who didn’t really interact on Lemmygrad too, but eventually the community organized to discuss what to do with them, forcing them to reply. Like I said the only limitation I would put on self-promotion is that you at least show you’re not just spamming everywhere.
But even then people will end up discussing your posts regardless of mod involvement. They will ask questions under the post and others will reply. So what’s the actual problem? That the OP is posting and not interacting? Why does that matter?
Really the only thing that should matter is why they are posting and where to. We had someone here who posted to a sort of incel blog if you remember and eventually took action against that. If it’s a website I don’t know then I might ask questions and need an answer from OP, but if it’s a source I know then what’s the harm?
Basically think of it this way. In lib spaces people willfully and readily post to the New York Times, Wikipedia, CNN, etc. We don’t ask them if they’re self-promoting. These organizations have a huge contingent of fans ready to post their links everywhere at a moment’s notice. When you don’t have that, you have to do it yourself. The first one is apparently not a problem, the second is almost always seen as one.
This is the contradiction most places, especially Reddit, find themselves in. They create large communities and it’s super easy to get noticed on Reddit because the work of creating a following has already been done. But they are able to create this community because people post in it and interact with it, leading to more people joining it. Without these members posting, they would have nothing to moderate. It then leads to another contradiction between moderatorship and community as they have opposite interests.
This is also why we rely on community self-management on Lemmygrad and often take time to respond to controversies on the platform, to soften that contradiction. We can’t make it disappear, but we can soften its effects.
It’s interesting to hear your experience on it. I’ve long felt that the visceral hatred some places have for self-promotion is odd, but I have no evidence to back up how it goes in practice. Personally, what bothers me most about self-promotion or large scale corporate stuff is when it’s sneaky and manipulative as such. I would much prefer to encounter someone who is open about it than come across a thing that has “hello fellow kids” energy and it’s some marketing employee for a corporation. The problem with the sneaky way being that it blurs the lines between casual social interaction and formal business transaction; which I don’t think is necessarily bad intrinsically? But when it’s done expressly for the purpose of manipulating and has no sincere relationship building behind it, it’s creepy as hell. The nature of business under capitalism means you kinda need to draw some lines between “casual social interaction and formal business transaction” or you’re going to get taken advantage of.
Anyway, all of this is to say, I think you make a good point and I don’t think self-promotion is intrinsically bad either. And in fact, being hard on it probably pushes more of it “underground” so to speak, to the creepy subtle stuff.
agree.
The only thing I would add to the post, because it’s not explicitly stated, is that you should be clear that you are promoting your own work, like you pointed out with the sneaky and manipulative behavior of corporations.
@criticalresist8@lemmygrad.ml has always been straightforward about this, so I’ve never felt misled and have not minded the self-promotion at all. Their interaction on posts is a big part of why I checked out their Substack page to begin with.
I remember the incel blog posts and how they were framed. It was totally different and part of that was the lack of transparency about their posts being self-promotion (aside from the weird incel thing). It absolutely is about how you do it and I agree that it’s ridiculous to put a blanket-ban on it. Honestly, I think many of them do it because that’s all they’ve ever known. If it’s always been frowned upon and they’ve never questioned that, then why would they allow it? Critical analysis is often only applied to changes, not the existing structure of the system.
In the case of the incel blog, I’m not sure it was self-promotion per se but the OP locked down the community and all posts (you have to do that manually each time you post, there’s no setting for it) to prevent any comments and didn’t interact anywhere else on lemmygrad. In that case yes it’s duplicitous. But I don’t have requirements that people should interact with the broader community before they even think about posting links to their own content. We all started somewhere. So my requirement is that you at least meaningfully interact with the comments on your own posts. You don’t have to answer all comments but at least provide something better than just “correct” or “yes!” like blue checks do on twitter lol