There appears to be some stigma associated with submitting your own content to social news sites. It makes no sense. It’s often considered blog-spam (which is totally wrong) or just plain attention-whoring. Attention whoring is a bit more accurate… but the entire point of creating content is giving it other people. Let’s start with the obvious, however: don’t doubt for a second that creators of content aren’t just creating accounts and doing it anyway. They are. Of course they are. The real issue though is that people shouldn’t be afraid of submitting their own content to social news sites (…the newest one made me laugh). The stigma is total nonsense. Shouldn’t it just be encouraged? Original content is the lifeblood of these sites.

These sites are already established as the primary way to get content around. It will only become more so in the future. Why? Because it’s so incredibly effective for both parties: content providers and content consumers. You can participate at every level as a consumer of content from the top-page only, all the way down to sub-section new queues.

To Content Creators…

Sites like digg and reddit act as social filters. Nothing gets ignored. There is a pyramid-like nature to the filter and that is why it is so effective. If you submit something to the geek sub-reddit, for example, it goes onto the new tab. From there, a handful of people (the ones most voracious for content) are going to read it. If it gets a few upvotes, you’ll find yourself very quickly on the rising tab for the geek sub-reddit. This will get your content even more discerning views from more people against comparatively stiffer competition. Up and up you go. Until you run into some vicious LOLcat who ends your rise. It’s Darwinism.

The point though is that you and the social sites are on the same side. They provide you with what you want (distribution) and you provide them with what they want (content). You should never have to apologize for adding content to a social news site. That being said, there are some caveats…

Blogspam

Blogspam is the name given to taking someone else’s content (often a video), slapping into an empty or vapid blog post, putting ads all around it, and then submitting it. Submitting your own content, however, cannot be blog spam. The point has been made before (from Daniel Miessler):

Many are confused about what blogspamming actually is: it’s not posting a link to something on your own blog or website (if it’s decent and original, that’s called “contributing”). Blogspamming is actually very specific (I had the Digg staff spell it out for me) — here are the requirements:

1. Find interesting content somewhere on the Internet
2. Post that content on your own website
3. Post the link to your website rather than the original source

Blogspam should be mercilessly down modded. Daniel’s thesis above bears repeating: If you think someone submitting their own original content hurts the quality of a social news site (or is blog-spam), you are dead wrong. Submission of original quality content improves the content gene pool and therefore improves the quality of the site.

As for me, since I have no ads, I’m doubly in the clear as far as blog spam goes.

Just plain old spam

If you are submitting more than a few times a week, you are probably getting a little spammy. I’d expect a social news site to react accordingly. If your stuff is really that good and you are that prolific, you’ll probably get to a point where you are up modded because of your reputation. On the flip side, and substantially more likely, if its mediocre, you’ll probably get down modded into oblivion just because of your reputation.

So now I have to go submit this, myself, to the social news sites. Hopefully, my down mods will be for general suckiness as opposed to poorly thought out blog-spam accusations.

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