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Comment by AlienRobot | Hacker News Reader

The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.

It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.

Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.

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I'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the value of a blog post.

Sadly a few have started doing this on HN now.

(Short low effort comment agreeing with parent comment) I wrote more about this here...<url>

I think it's possible to do it ethically, but anything that works is going to get gamed.

It's a pretty dark dystopian future where the only way for anyone to hear about anything is advertising or paid promotion by influencers because we're so aggressive about policing individuals marketing themselves.

The evolution of European history is built upon the evolution of art, specifically in architectural history, music history, and painting history. It has never been reflected in the evolution of technology; even if technology has evolved, it is built upon the evolution of art, such as steampunk, atomic punk, and cyberpunk. All European culture is characterized by its art-driven approach. However, when, as is the case now, cultural evolution is dominated by programmers, geeks, and dictators, it becomes a dystopian phenomenon. Art-driven approaches represent the correct way of sensory perception and intellectual summarization, much like the correct methodology offered by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Technological dominance, on the other hand, becomes an erroneous approach of abstract mechanics and objective facts, much like mechanical materialism encountering quantum physics. Remember my words.

Well you wouldn't want independent creators and small start-up businesses getting exposure over large corporate ventures with full marketing departments would you? Think about the pour investor class that has sunk so much money into marketing, and then some chick in a basement hand weaving some silver wire pendant gets a sale and only earns 15% markup instead of the mass produced cheap zinc pendant with a 300% markup.

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