on spamming

  As the writer of this blog, I have been trying to increase readership by using social media sites to improve traffic to my site. On the social media site facebook, I regularly post links to my blog so as to indicate to my friends that I have written something new that I feel they might enjoy reading, or that I think would make for an interesting conversation. Additionally, I sometimes post updates to my status telling people what I am doing or posting an idea or a saying I might have just developed.

  Thinking this type of behavior was acceptable, and not having been informed that the aforementioned activities (posting links to my own material, calling attention to my own actions or thoughts) was in any way frowned upon, I set up an account on reddit.com, where I proceeded to post links to my own material while also reading and voting on the links posted by others. Not long after starting with this self-promotion, however, did I receive a message from the staff at reddit.com telling me that, by posting links to my own material only, I was committing violations in spamming, and that the continued performance of these actions would lead to my account being closed and me being disqualified for membership with reddit.com.

I would like this blogpost to serve as a warning to all people who post links to their own material and to people who are not posting links to random or varied other material, even if they are also voting up or down or "liking" the posts of others: you might are likely guilty of spamming, even if your links receive positive feedback from the community and readers seem to be enjoying or at the least reading the material to which you link. If you do not regularly promote the work or content of others, you will likely be shut down for spamming, and attempts to self-promote or to promote your material in ways other than paid-for-advertising will likely result in you being asked to stop.

  The reason I acted the way I did on reddit was because it was exactly the same way I for years have been acting on facebook - drawing people's attention to things I enjoy, to things I make or create, to things I find funny - never even thinking that I was committing an offense or forcing people to consume my spam until a friendly administrator told me what I was doing. So educate yourself about the exact and often arbitrary parameters of the social sites to which you are submitting, readers, for if you do not pepper in the occasional link to someone else's page, you will be likely scolded for spamming on one site when the same activity is the order of the day on another.

  If doing things and then informing other people that you have done something constitutes spamming, then I am a spammer, and I will remain one.

場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp