EDIT 2 AT THE TOP AGAIN:
It seems there is some confusion around the term “promo posts”, so I’m making another adjustment for clarity. If this is muddying the waters instead, please point that out!
Self-promotion posts advertising their product requires community participation, or they will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be self-hosted in full without payment, your post is exempt from this rule.
I worry a bit that its getting unwieldy, so feel free to suggest options to clean up the language a bit.
EDIT AT THE TOP:
Promotional posts require community participation or they will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be used in full without payment, it will be exempt from this rule.
Intended to clarify on “paywall” - it has to be open source and run in full locally, no one-time or subscription-locked payment for features, to qualify. Donations don’t count as that doesn’t limit use, while something like Kavita (which has non-free features behind a subscription, despite the base being open source) would not have the benefit of exemption. The rule intent hasn’t changed here, just the wording on the exemption limitations.
I’ve gotten through (I believe) all the comments in the meta thread. So I want to establish a few things, first being a better definition on spam.
Spam is not “I don’t like this and its a paid product” or “I don’t like this and they used AI/LLMs”.
Spam would generally be considered:
- Mass-posting - Posting the exact same post across a bunch of of different communities, rapidly.
- Repetitive Content (aka karma farming) - repeatedly submitting old popular content. I’ll note that this is completely irrelevant on lemmy, this was more of a reddit issue due to karma.
- Bot Activity / AI Abuse - Using scripts/bots/gen AI to automate posts and comments.
- Unsolicited DMs - Mass private messages or chats to users, completely unsolicited
I’d say anything other than that deserves a followup rule, and this definition should go in the sidebar.
Regarding the promotional posts themselves, I think something like the 10% rule makes sense - no more than 10% of the account should be self-promotional material or comments within the community.
I do think it makes sense to include an exception for 100% free/libre open source projects. Partially open projects with a closed (paid) component should be subject to the 10% rule. So what I propose as the rule would be:
Promotional posts require community participation or they will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & without any paywalls, it will be exempt from this rule.
Questions, comments, clarifications, and harsh criticisms are welcomed in the comments. As a reminder from my intro post, and because of some comments in the other thread, I will mention:
There are people on both sides of the keyboards, so please be respectful of others.
Promotion of a software product? Not sure I understand where you’re coming from.
And now I’m doubly confused why you dont get the Plex reference.
Promo posts are purely promotional by the people who made them - not a discussion post or anything, basically a post thats an ad.
With Plex it would be like the Plex marketing team coming in to post about the new features of Plex version whatever and the $10 discount on the new $750 lifetime pass.
It would not be something like:
Etc.
The rule is only about those self promotional, sales style posts.
So I’m going to go ahead and try to update the rule for clarity now.
Yeah, that tracks fine.
It’s the recent one where a person told this group about their app, asked if anyone was interested in beta testing in exchange for full paid app access for free.
I don’t think that person posted in bad faith. But the crowd here acted like an absolute mob, calling him names, telling him to f*ck off, etc.
That was handled poorly. And I don’t think your rule would address the abuse part, regardless of how much “community interaction” you made a requirement.
That’s my problem with these new guidelines, they don’t address the venom people have towards folks for not much justifiable reason. You can’t just bend to what the crowd wants, sometimes they want blood.
Thats… Unfortunately another issue to be addressed here.
I also absolutely don’t like people commenting “slop” for anything within spitting distance of ai/llm’s, regardless of how it was used. For the record, there were months of backlogged reports about comments, despite tons of “rule 3” violations on posts never reported on, which I’ve now cleaned up.
I do think it does address it somewhat, in that there is no reason to dogpile if there is a valid rule to remove on, or its clearly permitted. It also clarifies on approved posts, and provides a valid reason to remove unhelpful and off topic comments for what is definitely a valid, rule abiding post.
Will of solve everything? No, but I think putting a rule like this in place is certainly the right direction overall.