I get it, I really do. Self-promotion restriction helps prevent a community from being flooded with spam of people trying to get your eyeballs to look at THEIR super unique and totally different from the millions of others out there, I promise stream, or YouTube channel, or whatever is the latest hot thing that people will spam you about. On another hand though, it also makes it much harder to drag people out of a big corporate platform where outrage is algorithmically boosted to maximize engagement, and over to here where outrage is not given an unfair boost and it’s a lot easier to just look at new posts and close the site for the day. And I recognize it’s a bit hypocritical of me to use streamers as an example, because everyone, including me here, thinks they are just the little guy trying to get eyeballs onto something relevant to that community—I think my case is special too, because of blah blah FOSS good and blah blah not trying to get you to buy or make a parasocial relationship with me, but others probably have their own arguments too that have to be unilaterally shut down to prevent everyone clamoring for exceptions and opening the gates to self-promotion hell with no actual discussion of the topic the community is supposed to be about.

It’s just really, really frustrating. I can’t siphon people off the big corporate platforms because rules against it, so I have to sometimes use that big corporate platform myself to find content for here or to talk about the topic—because nobody’s here to talk, because I can’t promote it somewhere with lots of people, because those are the big corporate platforms that won’t let me advertise. To be fair, I can’t advertise in general, but it still feels shitty and anticompetitive, even if the rule’s genuine intention was not about forestalling competition and more about not getting overrun by LOOK AT MY ART/STREAM/PLAYTHROUGH/REVIEW.