Edit 4:

This has more than substantial community support, and is being put into effect immediately.

Please bear with me on the sidebar edit, as I’m not going to be in front of my PC for a bit.

As previously mentioned this will remain up for the week to allow for refinement for edge cases if possible, and be aware I’m trying to see what I can do to make this more of a direct vote on specific options going forward. If anyone believes this needs revisiting after the week is up, please feel free to start a conversation on it.

May your latency be low and your uptimes be high!

Edit 3 - further refining.

There are some rather… unique interpretations of what a promo post is, along with an important note that some people lurk. Its important though that they participate somewhere to make sure its not a drive-by ad, but its fair to say that there are users in programming, linux, and other communities whose posts would be welcomed by users here.

Its also important to users here that its not just post and disappear.

So I’m adjusting to:

Promotion posts require your active participation in selfhosting or related communities, or the post 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 as long as you continue to engage in comments.

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.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    I feel that some further refinement is needed. I agree with the sentiment behind the latest version of the rule, but I think it still doesn’t address the recent issues.

    The way I see it, there is a very specific type of post that has started showing up very recently, and is getting lots of downvotes. Users here are justifiably suspicious of the pattern.

    The ones that get downvotes are usually:

    • from new accounts
    • the user makes one post, and at most they only responds to comments in that one post
    • the software uses the help of LLMs, while the post and/or comments are also helped by LLMs
    • the software is made to look “professional”, whether it is the UI, the demo, or the README

    I’m not sure what exactly the end goal is, but I don’t believe the story that they all use where they “had this problem and now want to share their solution”. I’m concerned that there is some other end goal, whether it is link farming, SEO manipulation, LLM search result manipulation, or it’s the setup portion of a cyber attack where questionable code will be added later (if it isn’t already).

    Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of “you know it when you see it”, but in this case it’s difficult since it’s very similar to legitimate posts. There are real users that want to post with a new account, such keeping their professional life separate from their main account. It’s also hard to differentiate it based on licenses, because those recent accounts almost always license it as FOSS. I also don’t think it’s fair to exclude all AI assisted code, since it’s very common to have that now.

    Perhaps instead of a rule, we could even try some of the following:

    • To reduce the risk of OpenClaw style bots creating content here: AI is ok for the code and external text (ex. the README), but the post here should be written by a human. It’s not like the post needs to be that long to express why someone should look at it, and it won’t go through that many edits. Translations should be done through traditional translation software.
    • To prevent driveby posts, we could automate a comment on new posts see if a user knows where they are posting. Asking about their favourite threadiverse community, or how long they have been a member here, or even how they learned about the community might separate bots from real users. It works pretty well for our registration applications on lemmy.ca / piefed.ca etc.

    On top of being suspicious, I think it boils down to “projects that have a future” and “projects that don’t have a future”. People in this community want to run software that is likely to stay useful and safe over time, and that’s at the core of why these recent ones are downvoted.

    • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusOPMEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of “you know it when you see it”, but in this case it’s difficult since it’s very similar to legitimate posts.

      Precisely the problem.

      The community has been really good about down voting the more troublesome ones, but a clean solution to this really isn’t easy.

      I’m hoping this can be where disclosures/tagging can really help, but this has a lot of roots in how the prior mod was handling things. Anything they didn’t like was a rule 3 removal, so appropriate rules I don’t think were made, and as a popular community… Yeah.

      I’m doing what I can starting with the most problematic that I can see (first the removals that didnt quite fit, now the promos in general, next ai/ai disclosures, and then we’ll have to see.

      Part of it too is that the community is not necessarily full of anti-ai folks (though there is one who has been following me around and downvoting), but against irresponsible ai use. I think a few posts have shown that (ai for translation, documentation, a snippet here and there that got reviewed and refined after by a human, etc).

      I’m of the same mind that its some kind of SEO or maybe telemetry they want to sell, but I’m not sure.

      That said, I’m all ears on options / discussions.