Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. Reddit explicitly forbids self-promotion. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

I understand their policies, but I'm running a business. I have time enough to share my work on Reddit, but I don't have time to be an active contributor to Reddit, submitting links from a variety of sources, just so I can occasionally post my own links and get no clicks on them.

The only self-promomtion alternative is posting a sponsored headline. Doing that every time I want to share my own stuff is just throwing away money.

View on HN

> The only self-promomtion alternative is posting a sponsored headline

How about engaging?

Your bio says you produce "text-based interactive novels". While this is something I have no expertise in, I'm sure there is an active and engaged community on Reddit, at least in some form. You likely have plenty of first-hand experience on the subject if you are a producer yourself, so perhaps the community would appreciate you sharing some of that knowledge and experience: anecdotes you've picked up along the way, what works, what doesn't work, etc. Maybe even some feedback on the work of others. A little generosity goes a long way.

A great example is bandholz (beardbrand) in the beard product space (/r/beards and more).

Reddit is owned by a mass media conglomerate. A significant portion of everything on the site is native advertising. Self promotion would interfere with what they are really pushing and undermine their influence. The smaller communities exist as goodwill to make the high traffic portions seem more authentic.

Using sponsored headlines makes you look even worse than posting unfortunately. You have to be an insider to get the native placement I guess.

Just watch for the next big hollywood movie to come out and random disguised content x to magically bubble up and plaster the front page.

> The smaller communities exist as goodwill to make the high traffic portions seem more authentic.

What makes you think smaller communities exist out of goodwill? People are allowed to create subreddits, and whoever is interested joins the subreddit and engages (or just lurks). It has nothing to do with goodwill. It's fascinating how you spun your narrative to make it seem like "Reddit is owned by a mass media conglomerate" is an evil thing.

Moreover, most people either run ad blockers that hide the sponsored headlines, or else have simply learned to ignore them as they scan the page visually.

I believe what OP is doing -- what all successful self-promoters on Reddit do -- is ignore the "no self-promotion" policy, but avoid getting punished for it by posting on very niche subreddits where a significant percentage of people are actually interested in the product and so "upvote" rather than "report".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com