Why the internet make it hard for people to self-promote

small44@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 36 points –

I understand that many people are spamming to promote, and that's not okay. However, it's possible to create dedicated threads or posts on social media every week for people to promote their websites, services, art, or anything else

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The quality of things being self promoted will on average be lower than that of content being posted by other people. (If your posting other people's content, it's because you think it's good, if you are posting yours it's just because you made it)

This isn't necessarily a problem, in a small community it adds content and helps the poster grow their skills. But in a larger community it can result in a lot of low quality content.

In case of art it's very subjective. Also if you create a dedicated post on social media like i mentionned bad quality self-promotion won't leave the post and will be easy to avoid, just don't open the post

I think it's because the Internet is paid for in large part by self promotion via ads, so free self promotion is discouraged in favor of paid self promotion.

The problem with paid ads is that people and businesses with the most money are the ones benefiting from it.

It’s pay-to-play unfortunately. Most moderated communities have regular weekly threads for self-promotion to avoid spamming the main feed. As an independent musician, I follow those rules and post only where appropriate. The other way is create your own social media artist pages, try to get as much visibility as you can, and promote from there.

Can you tell me some communities that allow promotion in lemmy? You get the same problem with creating artist page, you need to promote it somewhere

Most of the art/music communities on lemmy are still small so there aren't any strict rules against self promotion yet. It's mostly just "self promotion is allowed but no spamming". The communities on reddit have stricter policies and it's usually one day a week where you can self-promote. Artist pages in social media is a little easier because of algorithms. For example, I followed a bunch of pages that focus on music in my city, and a lot of them followed back. Now I get a random follow a couple of times a month because my page gets seen somehow.

It makes it easier IMO, have you tried self promoting IRL? It's a lot harder than on the Internet.

I’m guessing OP means it’s harder now than before the corporate siloing of the social web, not harder than handing out business cards on the street.

Things like that exist. Hacker News has a monthly "Who's Hiring" thread, lots of forums have advertising sections, etc.

I guess i should have say social media since i don't really use traditional forum nowadays. In facebook groups, reddit subs and lemmy communities i rarely see them allowing self promotion. The exception is communities that allow promotion of other communities

Did you have a question or are you informing us that we can use the internet to promote our projects?

From the looks of things, you're an artist who doesn't know how to promote themselves on the internet. I have an idea: don't. Build up your body of work, present it in public at a gallery. Do something locally that will get eyes on your artwork. Do a huge wall mural. Do a big guerilla piece of artwork involving a group of people. If you're a musician, you should be playing shows, not worrying about your online presence.

Art is consumed and spit out by the internet faster than you can say "artistically bankrupt". It won't garner you much attention to advertise and promote your art online.

Make a sublemmy for your stuff; people who are interested will follow it.

Make highlights on insta containing your various projects.

It's not about the promotion, it's about how and where it's done.

Good luck getting visibility on instagram "It's not about promotion, it's about how and where it's done" I agree with that, that's why i said self promotion shouldn't transform to spam. With a post created by the admin where people promote their stuff in comments you can avoid self promotion dominating the feed

It is really easy to self promote. The problem is that it is easy for everyone else to self promote as well.

Title talks about "the internet", your text talks about "social media" - and threads so seemingly a subset of social media.

The internet doesn't make it hard. It's incredibly easy. Sending emails is easy. Hosting a website is easy. Posting to platforms is easy.

Platforms and communities restrict - through their own rules - what they deem acceptable within their own scope. That's more about defining scope than "making it hard".

Reasonable self promotion is often accepted on reddit and lemmy. Blatant advertising is not. Be part of the community, or run an ad for an ad. Be a good participant rather than a spammer.

One of the first popular lemmy communities was one for announcing and therein promoting your own communities.