Anyone who manages an online community is constantly at war with one particular enemy: Web spam, and the endless onslaught of borg-like spammers who offload their syntactically deranged, hyperlinked gibberish night and day. In fact, I’ve launched websites that have started receiving streams of meaningless comments before I’d even started promoting.
I’m sure it’s the same for forum managers, whose aim is to host actual discussion between users who are genuinely interested in the local topic. Their battle is against the borg users who pose as “real” humans, but only post links to the content they’re trying to promote. And often it’s got almost nothing to do with whatever the conversation is about.
Some forums combat this by watching their users’ links closely and jumping on anything that seems fishy – such as a poster who links to the same site too frequently, or who openly invites people to “read my blog.” And it usually works to keep the robot quotient to a minimum. The problem is, not all of these people are borg.
Uh, I have a blog. And when I post something I think is truly awesome, I want to tell people about it. Or if I’m part of a discussion and something comes up that I’ve posted about in the past, and I think they’d appreciate it, I want to tell them about that, too. However if I do that, my post is promptly removed, and I’m told like a dirty dog not to link to my own content. Other users can link to it without hitch, but I can’t, as that behavior is unbecoming and borg-like. What cynical brand of censorship is this, I ask?
One well-known forum has responded to this conundrum by creating threads specifically for users who want to link out to their own blogs and YouTube channels. That’s an accommodating move, but now no one goes into those threads except to link to their own blogs and YouTube channels. Very useful.
What’s the harm in allowing a measure of self-promotion in an online discussion? When you’re talking to someone you just met and she mentions a professional service she needs, you hand her a business card, right? Is that the same as leaving ugly red flyers on the windshields of everyone’s car on your block? Methinks not.
True, there is a war going on, and our conversative freedom might suffer a little. But let’s keep the friendly fire to a minimum, shall we?
