Self-Promotion on Social Media

In the great migration happening from twitter to fediverse (mastodon, akkoma, et al) one group who understandably has been slow to do so, artists, has met with a major cultural difference they might not have expected, norms or explicit rules against self-promotion on many fediverse instances.

Some of this simply comes from the general way that forums, subreddits, and facebook groups tend to be run – if you allow self-promotion without any restrictions then eventually spammy self-promotion ends up constituting the majority of posts, drowning out everything else and killing the group. Mastodon works a little different from twitter in that there’s a “local” tab, making it function somewhat like a forum. So the posts people put on their own timeline matter. If too many people are hawking, then local timeline becomes like a bad facebook group that you leave because it got annoying.

But there’s also an ideological factor, with many having an open source, anti-corporate or even anti-capitalist ethos. I believe this side of things party comes from a good place and partly comes from a bad place and it’s important to recognize both sides of it in order to have more nuanced and better rules and norms. I’ll start with where I think it gets it wrong.

Firstly, we all are living under capitalism. This is not a blank check on how one acts – the phrase “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” which probably had a valid meaning originally, has been twisted into a generic cop out for any behavior. Of course one ought to act at most in accordance with your ethics as possible, even if it’s costly to do so. However, it is absurd to think that nano-entrepreneurs are inherently more guilty of doing a capitalism than, say, an employee. In some cases, it’s the other way around.

I believe some anti-market fundamentalism comes from a place of privilege. Markets are not the same thing as capitalism and a 19 year old trans woman selling bracelets on Etsy or an immigrant selling fruit out of a cart is nothing like your boss. Some people have no other opportunities under our system except that which they create themselves. We needn’t (and shouldn’t) oppose markets to oppose capitalism.

It’s also not a reasonable norm to demand modesty from people, because that ends up being simply a norm that promotes false modesty, a costume more easily worn by the allistic or the culturally hegemonic. People should be honest about themselves, i.e., the nerd ethic. I don’t have time for exaggerations nor downplaying, I need to know who has the comparative advantage in regular expressions so they can get to work fixing our e-mail validator. Such an ethic would both cut against exaggerated self promotion (no, you’re not the best rapper in the world) as well as false modesty (no, you’re not bad at writing, no one, least of all you, thinks you’re bad at writing, don’t fish for complements because I’m not biting). So here is where the anti-self promotion idea both gets it right and wrong – one must instead walk the middle path of being honest and ensuring people are notified of the existence of the cool thing they made. It’s going too far beyond notification where the evils some anti-capitalists note about advertising come to bear.

Lastly, a complete ban as opposed to nuanced regulations on self-promotion becomes a de facto privilege of corporate properties. Our culture is seeped in entertainment that some large entity owns the copyright to. It’s difficult to go about one’s day without inadvertently advertising movies, sitcoms and RIAA-affiliated record company music products. There’s just a baseline level of promotion happening at any time so it would be odd against that background to say that your friend can’t notify us about her basement hardcore show coming up.

Now what the ethos gets right – any self-promotion can expand your social capital and hence the power you may have over others. As already noted, there are severe issues with advertising as such and jamming up the channels of normal human communication with any advertisement replaces quality communication with manipulative noise. And again, it can be annoying. All valid things to want to avoid. It also tends to have a non-interactive quality to it. How am I supposed to respond to “check out my new short story” but with “sure, I’ll check it out!” It’s not a simple question or statement that keeps a conversation going.

And here is an important part of it – not all actually small business is equal. Some of it is a person making a product people actually want, making it and selling it. Some is just a multi-level marketing scam where your friend isn’t even a net benefactor. While it’s widely understood (hopefully) that multi-level marketing/pyramid schemes are unacceptable, people might be insufficiently wary of other things that share key properties with said. What makes MLMs bad? You’re not the one making most of the money (or necessarily any money at all), despite that you bought into it on promises of “being your own boss” so the “self” in self-promotion is dubious. You hawk to friends and family rather than customers in the general public who’d actually be interested, monetizing and exploiting existing relationships. And people indulging you by purchasing your wares may slow down the process by which you eventually realize it’s a scam and stop.

A lot of other things have at least one of these features without being MLMs. Think about being a local band. You have a show coming up where the venue pays you but you’re encouraged to encourage patrons to buy from the bar to make it worth it for them to have you there. You pressure friends and family to show up – people who wouldn’t be into your band or even that genre of music if they didn’t know you personally. This sounds almost like you’re a poorly paid marketer for the local venue and the liquor industry. This isn’t me saying that bands are part of an MLM scam. There’s more than one way to be a local band. Just that there’s a range of ways of doing business and some verge closer to things that ought be avoided and shouldn’t be encouraged.

Self-promotion in many of its forms enriches platforms such as Etsy, gumroad, twitch, etc. This is relatively more acceptable than MLMs as they take a smaller cut but in sum, this behavior benefits major platforms and middlemen. And of course, some things are just straightforwardly scams. Friends don’t let friends scam friends.

Norms that go too far the opposite direction also have problems and it’s good to avoid them. You shouldn’t feel guilty about not consuming the creative products of your friends. I say this as someone who sometimes writes or makes music. Like it if it’s your thing but don’t pretend to like it out of some misplaced sense of duty. The signals of your purchases and word of mouth recommendations affects your friend’s behavior, so you owe them honesty above all else. Your opinion of their work isn’t the end all, be all. It may be great but also not your thing in particular. But throw money at artist friends as a way to bribe them to keep making stuff that you like, not out of a glorified chamber of commerce “shop local” ethos. All this said, I like my friends’ art, music, comics and novels.

So all I’m saying is take a nuanced stance on this. Take a nerd ethos against corporate nonsense but don’t insist on an unworkable gift economy – I’d rather my nerd friend have an incentive to finish making the thing for me so that they actually do it. Recognize that we all have different strategies for life under capitalism and above a threshold of acceptable behavior, many are just as valid as others. Both extremes of hawking and hard lines against self-promotion interfere with the free flow of information. Sometimes I find out new things that I like through self-promotion and sometimes I leave a forum in disgust because it has too much self-promotion. And I’ll make sure I periodically let people know when I make cool things but also try not to annoy them about it.