Comment by coderintherye | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coderintherye | Hacker News Reader

What an excellent, insightful post. This really resonates:

"when self-promotion is done right, it never looks like self-promotion"

Blatant self-promotion manages to cause a visceral reaction in me, but as you note when someone is doing it obliquely then it just becomes an overall part of the story (indeed you the author are doing that a bit here which I wouldn't have even really noticed had you not mentioned it).

I'm part of an online community that recently had someone come in, manage to get an admin role and start self-promoting the heck out of themselves and their project. My initial reaction was to take my ball and go home. But some more even-minded folks helped me understand that really it is just, at its root, failed communication. The person likely has a real interest in helping and growing the community, but at the same time is balancing their interest/need to self-promote their own project. If their messaging were just a bit better and less explicit then it could come off in a completely different way.

Thanks for sharing such a great piece!

> Blatant self-promotion manages to cause a visceral reaction in me

Your visceral reaction is because you are not the intended audience for a piece of marketing. For example, music that’s noise to me may be melody to someone else.

We have had so many instances of being exposed to marketing not intended for us that we (a) don’t want to perpetuate the cycle by marketing ourselves (b) don’t even recognize good marketing any more.

The reason for this is that in the internet age, we’re in an always-on marketplace. Being from India, the internet age feels like being in an tourist trap indian bazaar where someone is always trying to sell you something.

This causes you to have your guard up until you can escape to the safety of your hotel room…and that is exhausting.

The answer is to not participate in the tourist trap market. Build your own market (figuratively) by doing your marketing your way and hope people/buyers find you.

Great points about noise, and you really hit it on the nose with your final point—I've heard of a mental model of Twitter being likened to tapping a tuning fork and seeing who resonates (https://twitter.com/kevinakwok/status/1076967914580918277).

The most fun (and probably best) self promotion is done with fun in mind—Tom Critchlow's post on small b blogging vs. content marketing comes to mind (https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/), and he extends his thought with this one (https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/03/12/strange-attraction/). I also liked Matt Webb's post on this (https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/10/streak).

Please excuse me if I'm being pedantic, I'd change the "hope" point to "showing a person"—even if it's just an email to a friend, cold emailing someone who you quote, etc.

Ah one more thing—I'm sure there's a better way to say this, but basically, the fact you're so considerate about noise is probably a great reason to actually post. I have a feeling the internet needs more people like you!

Based on your description, this community member's behaviour seems rather pathologically transactional, and fundamentally self-serving.

If I were part of a community of people dedicated to a common idea and shared outcome, only to have someone selfishly hijack it after paying lip service, I, too would want to burn the bridges and salt the earth.

Furthermore, while I acknowledge a certain moral superiority of those who are relentlessly graceful, I can see no obvious alternative explanation as to why this person would engage with your community except the willingness to burn $100 of others value in order to acquire $10 of their own.

Reddit is so overrun by mediocre content and reposts on burner accounts because of "anti self promotion" policies.

The real ugly truth is most of the people behind posts making it to the front page are sub mods, spammers, and wealthy individuals that pay regularly for ad promotion... Old reddit was simply better because the community was much smaller, and open to artists and creators posting their own work.

When a platforms grow too big spam and other issues are inevitable, corruption is bound to happen. Instead of fighting posts from people who actually create content, the move should be towards fostering content classification and displaying and moderating content fairly and equally.

The problem is that platforms are not properly nor equally promoting shared content... They are also charging contributors for visibility, while reducing organic visibility to drive their profits up.

Independent (undiscovered) creators aren't rich (and staffed/supported) enough to arrange focus groups and to develop marketing campaigns that "warm your heart", but on platforms, regular creators are foisted into competing for attention for their products and services against well funded and staffed mega-corporations.

Independent (not yet profitable) creators have it harder than ever to achieve visibility now. Favoritism and payola are rampant in all social media settings as well. Most of the things we see first online are well funded and organized campaigns, we just can't tell because suggestive and manipulative marketing has taken over.

This leads independent creators to resort to underhanded techniques like botting and illegal activity to fund paid promotion.

The Internet was originally started based on equal access to Information. By aligning with an ideal that self promotion is a negative thing, that's reinforcing the ideal that equal access should not exist, and it also encourages a lot of negative online activity that serves as a smoke-screen for wealthy corporate interests.

If a site or app can't fairly manage it's audience, that's the first sign it's outgrown it's pants, and turned against equal access to information to favor their own profit... We need to stop supporting sites and apps that serve as smokescreens for big industry profit and return to smaller (independent) communities for promoting business, art, and services because the large ones don't serve independents, they serve big industry.

I prefer ads that are labeled as ads and tied to reputable individuals and companies. That creates trust for me. I do not find trust in ads that use human psychology to indirectly influence decision making... Take crypto for example, it's the primary thing that conveniently "somehow" made it through all the "anti self promotion" gates (for strange unknown and untraceable reasons).

The fight against self promotion is very toxic and has an agenda of it's own in my opinion.

Thanks for the kind words and for reading, I'm glad the post resonated. In situations like online community moderation, self-promotion is doubly sensitive, and timing needs to be super deliberate (e.g., probably only when the need arises, and then passively in signatures or something?). I appreciate you sharing, definitely will be noodling on that some more.

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