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.
I disagree that it would be the same than no rule at all, in my opinion that gives a pretty clear position on what’s allowed and what’s not without setting any strict limits so there’s some room for interpretation for community/mods to act.
Maybe rephrasing a bit helps: “This community is not an advertising platform. Self promotion is allowed only from active members of this community. Excessive promotion will result on post removals and/or ban from the community.”
What I’m afraid is that if there’s a strict rule then someone will argue that “only 9,87% of my posts are promotion, I don’t deserve a ban” even the rest of their content has little to no value for the conversation. And, since it’ll be a rule for the community, I personally think it should apply as it’s written, so it should have some kind of option to weed out smartasses trying to game the system in place.
But I’m not likely to promote anything around here, so for me it doesn’t really matter, just trowing out my thoughts about the matter.
Would spamming low effort comments to fill a quota then fall under the spam bit, not necessarily self promotion bit? It would be quite obvious and from what was written in the post, moderators have more hand-wavy freedom to decide what is spam.
I have no dog in this fight either since all of my projects are open hardware so nobody cares anyway because it would cost money to build it and test it out 😂
Possibly, but there’s equally gray area that what counts as low effort spamming and what actually contributes to the conversation. For example I’ve replied to comments “I’m using X to do Y” with “I’m using X too and I’m happy with it” to give an opinion to possible solutions. That kind of comments are easy enough to throw out and, if the “10% rule” is interpreted strictly, it isn’t really obvious if they should be considered as “improving your ratio” or as a part of actual conversation.