The internet makes it supper easy for people to self promote. The problem is that everyone can self promote, and all of that self promotion turns into noise.

Communities and social media are sick of millions of people trying to promote themselves and have been for years, so they limit promotion. Some sites and communities have dedicated self promotion spaces, others ask you for a small fee to promote yourself through ads.

You can start r/selfpromotion or a dedicated Lemmy server on selfpromotion.space, but you won’t find an audience there.

You can easily self promote in online communities by posting relevant original content and adding a link below that. The you’ll just need to be lucky for your posts to gain popularity so you stand out from the millions of others trying to do the same.

Imagine what promoting your work was like back before the internet. You could probably get the neighbourhood to notice your work by talking to people, but you’ll ever reach anyone outside your general area without paying hand over fist for advertising. The internet brought you that power for free, at the cost of also bringing that power to everyone else fighting for attention.

As an OF girl in a saturated market I feel this 😂 but thanks to capitalisation it’s hard for anyone to promote themselves, because websites and companies would rather sell time and space to advertisers rather than allow space for independent creators / artists / musicians / whoever to promote themselves. I think the internet has made it simultaneously easier and harder for unknown artists etc to show the world what they’ve got. The barrier to get yourself out there is much lower (just make some social media pages and upload your stuff) but the barrier to actually be seen by the right people is much higher (find the right hashtags, somehow go viral, stroke of luck?) and while you want to connect with the right people you’re also cautious of being too spammy. Not sure what the answer is as it depends on what you’re trying to promote, but I personally am much happier to be “advertised to” by independent creators, artists than I am by billion dollar companies or someone who wants me to drink their weight loss shakes

Title talks about “the internet”, your text talks about “social media” - and threads so seemingly a subset of social media.

The internet doesn’t make it hard. It’s incredibly easy. Sending emails is easy. Hosting a website is easy. Posting to platforms is easy.

Platforms and communities restrict - through their own rules - what they deem acceptable within their own scope. That’s more about defining scope than “making it hard”.

Reasonable self promotion is often accepted on reddit and lemmy. Blatant advertising is not. Be part of the community, or run an ad for an ad. Be a good participant rather than a spammer.

One of the first popular lemmy communities was one for announcing and therein promoting your own communities.

why would they give you an ad space for free if they could charge for it. dog eat dog world

The quality of things being self promoted will on average be lower than that of content being posted by other people. (If your posting other people’s content, it’s because you think it’s good, if you are posting yours it’s just because you made it)

This isn’t necessarily a problem, in a small community it adds content and helps the poster grow their skills. But in a larger community it can result in a lot of low quality content.