Reddit

In the sub I helped mod, it was a necessary way to reduce spam. Our rule was simple - no links to storefronts.

link to reviews, link to release announcements, blog posts / devblogs - fine! link to steam or etsy or whatever - nope.

without this nuance, it quickly devolved into a few folks flooding the forum for personal promotion. with the nuance, they'd have to create content - blogs, reviews etc., - that would actually be worth visiting instead.

YMMV, and I think this also very subjective depending on the kind of creators involved.

I think it's fair enough. If they accept your spam then they have to accept everyone else's spam too. No it doesn't make any difference that your stuff is free. Reddit subs are usually for discussion not marketing; there are channels to spunk your adverts down and you should use those instead of trying to insert them into discussions. No it doesn't make any difference that your free stuff means you don't have a marketing budget. We all know today's free stuff is tomorrow's subscription stuff, and yeah I can already see you're about to scream at me that you don't ever intend for that to happen. But the simple fact is if your stuff takes off then you're going to have to make more time for it but free stuff isn't going to pay your bills and you're going to have to start raising cash one way or another.

What you should be doing is to continue being a positive contributor, and put your promo stuff on your "about me" page. Anyone who is interested enough in you will look at your profile, see your stuff and maybe then consider engaging with your products.

Forget the 10% ratio, remember the rule NO MARKETING, and then everyone will be your friend again. The 10% rule is not intended to say "you can spam this much and no more", it's to allow people to talk about actual products they like (that others have made) and point to them without those pointers being misconstrued as promotion.

"...votes..." No, the rules are for preventing spam, the voting is to highlight high quality posts over the low quality stuff.

"...billionaires..." What an odd strawman. Business of all sizes from freebie shops like yours up to Microsoft are NOT ALLOWED TO SPAM chatrooms. You're likely to see more stuff about billionaire businesses simply because they're bigger, not because they have some privilege you don't.

I mean come on, there are enough fucking adverts everywhere without discussion groups being full of that shite too. Advertise in advert channels. Chat in chat channels. Don't mix the two. Of course you're proud of the stuff you've made and that's a good thing, but there is a time and a place for promoting it and that place is NOT a discussion group.

I always thought these rules were not very well thought out. If I want to share something I made that happens to be something like a YouTube video then it's suddenly self promotion and I need to find ~9x as many posts to share. That's a good way to get a bunch of really worthless articles shared that nobody wants to see.

With hundreds of games, updates, dlc, mods, merchandice, videos and streams appearing each passing day gaming communities would get flooded by spam if no such rules would be in place. If you want to advertise on a commercial platform then you should do so through official channels.

Generally lemmy and reddit communities favor more organic content like for example solo game developer could ask for a feedback on piece of art of game mechanic they've implemented to their game in gamedev related communities. They could also participate to community events like screenshots saturday, share your progress friday or anything similar.

Now /r/gaming and /r/pcgaming are probably huge communities that are mostly about discussing gaming news, articles and just general topics around gaming. These communities are probably hard to moderate as is and allowing people to self promote there could lead to flood of indie or mobile game ads, streamers and youtubers trying to get more views for their vods or streams, etc which could really annoy the community.

Strange that they don't count comments IMO. My first reaction was that I like the self-promotion rules because the ones I'm familiar with just require posters to interact with the community. i.e. For every post to their Youtube channel/whatever there need to be ~9 comments.

I always liked that because it prevented the subreddits I browsed from becoming giant ad spaces where content creators just dump a link to their video on all related subreddits and move on. If someone is never answering questions asked of them in their own threads and not participating in discussions in any other thread then they're more of a leech on that community than a contributor IMO. I like the idea that in order to have access to the views of the community, you need to also view other people's work within the community and interact.

But to count only posts is weird for sure. I don't feel like the rule really helps anything. For example if I had a channel that was relevant to r/pcgaming to meet the rule criteria I feel like I'd just post my content, then post 9 other inane threads that I didn't really care about/intend to participate in. "What's your opinion on Final Fantasy XIV?" "Someone explain to me why Epic Game Store is so much worse than Steam" "What games are you getting from the Steam Summer Sale?!" etc. etc.

Accounts created to give unsolicited promotions exist though. It's especially common for AI products

Isn't this what upvotes and downvotes are for?

If they let up and downvotes run the site there'd be dicks on the front page of r/aww on the daily.

10% is a really strict cutoff for people that make things as a hobby.

I always explained it thusly when I modded: We don't want a content creator with a reddit account, we want a redditor who does some content creation. Plenty of site to participate in and plenty to talk/post about that doesn't involve your thing.

I don't know the particulars in your case nor am I especially interested in going on reddit to learn them but if that mod is saying tone it back some, then tone it back some. Tone it back more then the 10% so it doesn't look like you're trying to game the system too much.

There are two solutions.

The first is to post to the very specific relevant forums. The niche forums want your content.

The second solution for you is to do what corporations do and create many sock puppets. When a new episode of a Disney series comes out, a post is made promoting it and no one is warned for self promotion despite the post very likely coming from Disney Marketing.