What if you get someone else to post your otherwise-self-link?

February 3, 2003 1:24 PM

Aladfar makes an interesting point:

And here's the thing about self links: This was an interesting project that, were it linked by someone other than the author, would be absolutely fine on MeFi. Would it be better to ask someone else to link for you in an effort to circumvent the "rules"?

How do we feel about logrolling?
posted by PinkStainlessTail to Bugs at 1:24 PM (13 comments total)

I think asking someone else to post for you has probably been done - we'd all be very naive in assuming it hasn't. Hopefully the person being asked can judge whether or not it would be a mercy post (at which point, just say no) or a post that they would have made even if they had stumbled across it on their own. Short of monitoring everything every one of us does every second, I don't see how you could stop the occasional friend doing a favor. That's hard to spot. Self-linking almost always gets outed, though. And then you feel like an ass.


Dick Paris makes a good point. And there are always text ads.

Someone in that thread you linked to said that tweebiscuit should have emailed Matt first to ask if the post was ok. Yep.
posted by iconomy at 2:00 PM on February 3, 2003

As I said in the blue, I think tweebiscuit has been down this road before. If he'd have gotten a friend to do it, I doubt there'd be any ill will at all. Hero to goat happens quick 'round these parts.
posted by Wulfgar! at 2:07 PM on February 3, 2003

Some information about Log Rolling for those of us that didn't know what it meant.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:09 PM on February 3, 2003

"And there are always text ads."

I've had my site linked here using a text ad for several months. That seems like the best solution to me. I buy the ad to support Metafilter, but I do get a decent bit of email from people who followed the ad and found my stuff useful.

So - Don't be a sneaky dickhead about it. Buy a text ad. If it's worth posting word will get out, and people will link it, and it will end up posted as a thread on it's own merits.

Support Metafilter damn it. Don't be a sneaky dickhead. Self-links are evil terrorist acts - Text ads are a golden ray of sugary sunshine.
posted by y6y6y6 at 2:25 PM on February 3, 2003

In other words, we're deciding if there's a "but-it's-really-interesting" exception to the self-linking ban. Others may feel differently, but I say: Of course there isn't. Everyone thinks their self-link is interesting.

The point of the ban as I see it is not just to prevent blatant self-promotional links but also to recognize that we don't often judge what we do ourselves as well as we judge what other people do. And we can't help but have a bit of excitement about finding out what people think of what we've done. All these factors keep self-linking from being a good idea.
posted by argybarg at 2:27 PM on February 3, 2003

Blue_beetle:"...for those of us that didn't know what it meant."

Thanks, that was presumptuous of me. It's maybe not quite the right term in any case, since there are negative connotations, which wasn't my intent (though the potential for abuse is certainly there).
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 2:42 PM on February 3, 2003

Ynoxas knows about the cabal. He must be silenced.
posted by eddydamascene at 3:36 PM on February 3, 2003

On the contrary. There's this little movie I like that has one of the coolest lines ever: "Let him rave on, that men shall know him mad". (Yul Brenner was so cool.)
posted by Wulfgar! at 3:46 PM on February 3, 2003

In other words, we're deciding if there's a "but-it's-really-interesting" exception to the self-linking ban. Others may feel differently, but I say: Of course there isn't. Everyone thinks their self-link is interesting.

Matt has in the past allowed really interesting exceptions to stay on the front page. Those have typically been good causes of some sort or another or very informational sources rather than any sort of art or project site though.

I'm inclined to agree that no self-link is a good self-link, but I've been proven wrong before.
posted by cCranium at 4:18 PM on February 3, 2003

Ideally, it'd be nice if tweebiscuit emailed me the link, I would have posted it myself, but given that it has been posted, I think it's good enough to keep around, despite the rule breaking.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:58 PM on February 3, 2003

asking someone else to post your link isn't really circumventing the rules. i think of it like getting a second opinion. the other person can say no if you're linking, maybe, an n'sync website, or something else too cool for mefi. #mefi is full of people who would probably fall over themselves if you gave them something fun to post.
posted by rhyax at 6:18 PM on February 3, 2003

I like the idea of sites where you can share your own stuff and get feedback. Metafilter isn't the place, I guess, but perhaps there could be a projects.metafilter.com or something where people could share things they're working on. Would this defeat the purpose of textads? Maybe, but I don't think a projects page would be as widely visited as the metafilter front page, and while lots of people have blogs they want to advertise, fewer, I think, have projects. (Is there a distinction? I certainly think so.)

Now a slew of you are going to tell me about websites that already exist to do exactly what projects.metafilter.com would do. I hope you do, anyway. For the time being, there's a site where I share things with college friends--a wonderful community, but I'm interested in knowing of others.
posted by tss at 7:51 PM on February 3, 2003

actually tss, several people have suggested the same thing in the past, and I have considered doing an "announce.metafilter.com" site to let people self-link to their heart's content, but kindall went ahead and made a mefi-projects email list that is mentioned on the post page of MetaFilter.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:01 PM on February 3, 2003