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Comment by d1l | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of people out there who share Bill Watterson's beliefs about art or their creations. You just don't hear about it because obviously they aren't interested in shilling. I do, however, wish that blatant self-promotion was more frowned-upon by our culture. It's hard to tell when the creator is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for personal gain. I personally believe, though, that we don't live by money (or prestige) alone. I take comfort from the fact that for thousands of years others have shared this belief.

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If you don't promote then your work is much less likely to be noticed by the people who would like or appreciate it, though. There's SOOO much crap being released now, you're really knee-capping your chances at success if you don't promote as much as possible (speaking as someone who has thrown away opportunities because I've been pretty terrible at self-promotion).

I'm watching it right now with my wife. She's been relentlessly promoting her first book, and she's gone from someone no one knows about and 0 preorders, 0 followers to beating several established authors in her writing groups' in having more preorders for her first book than they've gotten for any book they've ever released. She's creating her own promo graphics, writing and engaging in Facebook group takeovers, and filming her own Instagram and Tik Tok videos. She's up to almost 1000 followers in just a couple months. And this is for a pen name she doesn't want to share with friends or family, so not even getting any initial boost from them.

Meanwhile I've been trying to make it as a board game designer for the past six years (as a side-thing), and haven't really gotten anywhere, since I've been mostly just networking with publishers and other designers and not the fans, and have hesitated to really put myself out there much (still get nervous talking to a publisher for the first time). I do have one signed game, but it's probably not coming out for a few years still.

You said it in your first paragraph. You've equated success with some kind of approval from others.

I'm saying some people, like Bill or the dwarf fortress brothers, or countless others, have a different idea of success.

Or perhaps they just want people to enjoy the work. Success is an overloaded term.

I would definitely prefer people producing things I’m interested in promote them than not.

Yes, I also read “success” as in “getting your message heard”. Art is a statement and is pointless in a vacuum. As Sufjan says, “What's the point of singing songs / If they'll never even hear you?” Or the old “if a tree falls…”

> You've equated success with some kind of approval from others.

Yes, this approval is called "money to survive." If you don't self-promote, you are not going to get enough income to support your side hobby, which means it has to remain a side-hobby powered by whatever extra time you have left after your real job. That might not be much, if any.

Looking down on people for "shameless self promotion" means that you only want art from people privileged enough to have a job that can support it, or that are passionate enough to make significant sacrifices to their quality of life. We can deal with a little self-promotion so that they are compensated for their time and effort.

As I wrote already,

>I personally believe, though, that we don't live by money (or prestige) alone. I take comfort from the fact that for thousands of years others have shared this belief.

That said I'm not really interested in arguing with you. I'm already familiar with all the rationalizations and arguments. I choose to believe something different, that's all.

Okay but I also question the real motive behind posting something like “this is what I believe and I’m not interested in debating it”. Why post something like that in a space that is meant for debate and discussion?

This space is not merely for debate, and discussion can include simply sharing your opinions.

I understand where gp is coming from. I no longer engage in argument on the internet. Over a very long period of time I've found it to be a waste of energy.

I share my opinions and move on.

> I personally believe, though, that we don't live by money (or prestige) alone.

Yep, and like I said, that means you're bias towards those with the privilege of having jobs/lives that allow them to work on side hobbies without compensation. They exist, but they are much fewer. Self-promotion is the price of more art.

I love coding. Wrote my first code when I was 8, so I've been doing it off and on for 35 years. It's my art. There's a chance I've managed to write code in more languages and on more platforms than any other HN'er.

I also loathe self-promotion. Not because I'm some kind of purist, I just... suck at it. Hate it.

So guess what? I'm miserable. Money has always been okay sometimes, hard a lot of others. I'm stuck on an endless treadmill right now with my resume hoping that if I just keep polishing this turd, somebody will see some value in it and that will help me feel like less of a failure in my 40s.

This argument paints a too starkly black-and-white idea of success. We should not romanticize the starvation of the artist, and we should accept some of the facts on the ground, like, "success should include happiness" and "our society doesn't reward unrecognized artists".

Much as I appreciate Watterson for never making Calvin and Hobbes into a product -- and I truly do -- I'm not so quick to judge anyone else as a sellout.

I'm pretty proud to say that many contributors to the D programming language have found it to be a path to a well-paying job. Many employers look to our contributors for people to hire. Anyone can contribute - all we care about is the quality of the code contributed.

It's an interesting example as both of them have phenomenal approval from others and are widely respected, shared and enjoyed for decades and seen as successful along various lines of criteria. By tautokogical definition, we cannot share mutually recognizable examples of artists who aren't seen and shared :).

They may have taken unique path there, but I'm not certain their motivations are as different. If an artist does not want their work to be shared and seen and enjoyed, I'm not even sure they're an "artist" , as opposed to someone who's spending their private time on a whimsy and hobby - They're just tinkering in a vacuum with audience of one. Art, to me, is created to have an impact, an impression, a point do view, or a message, or emotion - all of it predicated on a receiving audience.

I think we'll quickly agree that methods of achieving that sharing can be significantly different, and there certainly are other motivations such as money and fame etc, but this perspective of an artist as someone who doesn't care is their art is seen strikes me as depressingly anti social.

Fairly easy for Bill or the Dwarf Fortress brothers to have that stance after they've already gotten "lots of approval from others", i.e. their work has found plenty of fans. If their work didn't have anyone enjoy it, well first of all we wouldn't know who they were to use them as examples, and also I bet they'd be struggling with their 'no blatant self-promotion' stance, or probably wouldn't even keep it.

If my work already had the reach of either of those people I'd probably wouldn't bother with self-promotion either (because I dislike doing it, ideally I'd just like to throw stuff over the wall and whoever likes it will easily find it, but I know it doesn't work like that anymore).

I got lucky with one of my video games, Proximity, that I barely self-promoted but others liked it enough to promote it for me (front page of Newgrounds.com way back, got stolen and added to a ton of Flash game sites without my involvement back in the day, which was the norm for Flash games back then).

I failed to nurture that, and now probably very few, if any, people are playing the game, despite it being a game that was played millions of times as a Flash game 12 years ago, and the sequel being one of the first eight games demoed on Xbox Live Indie Games platform and got played a bunch of times there too.

It possibly could have been almost the next Tetris in the hands of someone better at self-promotion than I am, but it didn't, and it's now pretty much forgotten, and most likely will shortly after I'm dead. And I've been kind of stuck with trying to determine what the next version should be like, what direction to take it, and finding the time and energy to work on it. I very well could die before a new version even gets released. Really doesn't help that all platforms it was released on are no longer around (Flash, Xbox 360, and iOS but ancient, would take too much work to update it).

How do you determine when self-promotion is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for physical gain? My wife sincerely wants to be able to quit her day job and make her living writing books, and has spent twenty years not even being able to finish a book, and only this past couple of years figured out what works for her to start getting these things made.

She also wanted to make it as good as she could, so she's dropped probably over a thousand dollars on various things including editing and proofreading, so it would be nice if at the very least she makes that money she invested into the book back, which she wouldn't have been able to do with zero self-promotion (that's not how Amazon works, she would have sold very few books, there's too much other crap out there).

It generally irks me when I hear about someone who tried to get famous in about 5 distinctly different categories before they actually became famous. It seems like that is just not looked down upon enough. I was reading about how Blippi was apparently a Jackass like videos where he shit on his naked friend in a Harlem Shake video. It really tells you what he's after and it informs you about his goals. And when Blippi came out with his own NFTs it made sense because you know what he's out for.

This very idea that you should be trying to determine if a creator is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for personal gain, assumes negative intentions.

When you assume negative intentions, you accuse sincere people of a cynical desire for personal gain.

The reality is, you can't tell what someone's motivations are, and believing you can sets you up for a world of intentionally hurting people who are just trying to live their life.

Well, we live in a world where it isn’t considered sociopathic to refer to and think of yourself as a “brand” somehow.

Right now. It isn't consider sociopathic right now. But it is my sincere hope that it will soon be again.

I think it's easy to overestimate how many people approve of this attitude, because the ones who do are also extremely loud and present in mass media.

Current technology reinforces and incentivizes this model. You, your friends, and the people whose thoughts you find interesting are placed in the same feed, on an equivalent level, with global brands that have astronomical marketing budgets. The individual must evolve toward a brand in order to remain relevant in the feed.

I think categorizing users for marketing purposes is different than someone proclaiming they’re a brand.

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