I've never understood some Mastodon instances' obsession with "no self-promotion." Don't be obnoxious about it, but if you've written or made something cool, I want to know about it!
(Also, if we want this space to be interesting and more than a collection of shitty memes and "boost if you agree" posts, letting people self-promote is pretty critical).
@Zeb_Larson There are people who abhor self promoting. They are often more comfortable in an environment where that is rarer and find it easier to relate to people who don't.
I agree that "Don't post your own work in a non-reply public, federated, listed toot with no mentions" goes further than I can imagine such rules making sense.
I don't model it as someone objecting to seeing that artwork/blogpost/piece of software, but as people starting to be suspicious that others' posts have unspoken ulterior motives (which then makes interaction challenging: do you voice the suspicion, try to behave as if you didn't have it, or what else?). I expect that the rules end up being weird overbroad heuristics, because "if you are tooting so as to achieve an outcome, be explicit about it" is unenforceable. Even taking that into account, I'd expect that rules less broad than "don't ever link to things you've made" would work.
BTW. I'm curious whether spaces that are purely dedicated to "I've noticed this interesting thing" kind of posts can survive (you seem to be saying that it's unlikely, my intuition says opposite, but I have no reasonable evidence -- all my anecdotes in this area are distant enough on at least some axis to make them unconvincing).
@robryk I guess in a way I see the stuff I write as "here's an interesting thing," and I like the conversational back and forth I get from people reacting to it. Sometimes the feedback is critical, and that's still useful and thought-provoking!
Maybe what it comes down to is the ulterior motive you describe. If the ulterior motive is "I need you to buy something from me," yes, we can dispense with that. I'll admit that one of the reasons I left Twitter was to get away from that.
@robryk Or, to be a bit more abstract, how much are you using this to brand yourself? I never cut it as a Twitterstorian for many reasons, but one of them is that I simply found it boring and off-putting to repackage my research into a fifteen tweet-thread every day just to see how many retweets I could get. Framed another way: I'll post what I write once, but I generally don't post the same thing twice.
@Zeb_Larson I'm not sure if the "brand" framing is the same. For one, people might not even have a (conscious) concept of branding oneself. At the same time, being the fellow who points out random interesting things is a brand if you squint at it, just like being a fellow who will correctly and happily answer questions around subject X might be considered a brand. In that understanding of brand _everything_ you do publicly furthers your brand.
Re at-most-once framing: I think it's a good heuristic, but I can imagine ways to (a) adhere to that and yet give me a very strong impression of being underhanded (b) make it hard for others to obey that heuristic without breaking it yourself.
I'm not sure how large a fraction of anti-self-promotion crowd current me and past me can claim to represent, but it might be nonobvious and interesting that from ~all of my POVs doing self-promotion _while describing what you are doing and why to the same audience_ would be fine and would not cause me to feel that something underhanded is happening.
> I guess in a way I see the stuff I write as "here's an interesting thing,"
I totally agree with this framing; I poorly described the distinction I wanted to draw. I spent a few more minutes thinking about that distinction and am less sure than previously that it actually exists (i.e. has all the properties I thought it had).
@robryk And I can appreciate that, but I've also seen people chiming in on a stranger's post just to chide them for doing it.
I guess for me it depends on context. People spamming notification groups where the post is marginally related to the subject matter? Exceptionally obnoxious. Jumping into somebody's else toot to link their own writing when it's at best marginally related? Annoying. But not posting your own artwork because somebody might object to having to see it is a stretch for me.