(Everyone likes to complain about how the market's going to collapse, I'm trying to figure out how to benefit from the recent short calls.)
However, I submitted it, and didn't feel it was right to troll it around too much. Of course, as a result, it didn't go anywhere, so I guess I learned my lesson!
Ray Villalobos
· 2 years ago
Right on, as the popularity of sites like Digg increases, it's getting more difficult to be noticed. I think it helps to be well connected, have friends and check out things they're promoting. If you find the right friend with similar interests, you can help each other without colluding and compromising your integrity.
Sam Smith
· 2 years ago
I whole heartedly agree. I submit the majority of my content (quality, original content mind you) to reddit and digg. When I read people's complaints about blogspam, it's hard not to take it personally. The only thing I can say for people like me is that the original content we create is vastly more valuable than the true blogspam we see so much.
Ronald Lewis
· 2 years ago
100% correct. It is not spam to submit your OWN content to these sites. Yes, we must deprogram the negative connotations associated with self-submissions.
Jeff Woods
· 2 years ago
This has been something I am struggling with, but from a slightly different angle. I am not a wordsmith of any type, but rather a glass artist trying to gain more exposure. However I hate the idea that if I submit links to my own work, it feels like I may be viewed as a spammer. Would it be better for me to create a blog about my work and submit that rather than links to my product galleries? Any suggestions for artists like me who create visual rather than literary content and how I should submit it to sites like these?
Josh of Pixelton
· 2 years ago
Kudos for speaking up on this very true item...and for making it to the Reddit front-page. :)
Kyrie
· 2 years ago
I totally agree with Daniel. I have started blogging since March and my blog has been mainly an outlet for me to express my personal emotions and such. I hope all this personal journaling lately can inprove my writing skills one day. I can never call myself a writer but I have suddenly found myself enjoying the writing process very much ever since I started blogging. Anyway, it is all personal stuff, but when sometimes I do feel I written something better, I really would like to share with more people.
Jeremy Hobbs
· 2 years ago
I'm very much in agreement with you, and just submitted this to plime. I'll take a lot of negative votes for it, but I totally believe in what you're saying. Thank you!
Sean
· 2 years ago
So true, I agree with you 100%. I have and continue to submit my own stuff, it's it's liked then great, if not then no harm done. I don't even know where some of these goofy internet mores come from to be honest. It's like a mob mentality where one cynical guy decides that, "This is how it is!" and everyone else just goes along with it :-)
Mike Sabat
· 2 years ago
I totally agree with this. Additionally it's important to check the New Submissions page on Digg or Reddit every once in a while and vote up the good stories.
Another thing that I do is click the most interesting adword on an article I like. I usually don't purchase from the ad, but it has happened.
Tom Hastrow
· 2 years ago
Mr. Miessler,
I've been writing professionally for about 20 years. Aside from the volume of writing that's been published, my HD also contains hundreds of unfinished pieces on politics, culture, economics, and contemporary history, including a lot of reports written when I was "standing there", an eye-witness -- stuff that might interest people. So IMO the central point IMO is dead accurate, and well-thought:
"... Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit."
As to making that happen ... perhaps this is v1.0, and deserves some more development? This piece of reasoning is not working for me, and I suspect won't work for others:
"... I attempted to do this by showing how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing and submitting it from your site to try and steal ad traffic."
The difficulty is that the term "spamming" was in use before paid ads even existed online, and in fact self-promotion is exactly what it did/does mean, whether on Usenet or Digg. That meaning has a lot of inertia, and will not be changed easily. Perhaps you can come up with a different logic to encourage self-submitting, perhaps even a new word or phrase that will differentiate it from spam?
In a relevant side-thought, this comment made me wince:
"... Have the balls to submit your own material if you think it’s worth reading."
I'm not wincing personally, but on behalf of people who earn a living directly from writing (selling the content) rather than by advertising (using content to sell ads). The two business models are quite different, or so it seems to me, having done both. If I were primarily in the business of selling ads, no doubt I'd be finishing up the unfinished articles right now, reckoning that traffic=Googlecheck. As it is, I don't mind posting unpublished work without payment -- I do it quite often, without fanfare -- but many of the articles are just PITAs waiting to get me slashdotted/dugg, leading to a few thank you notes borne by hundreds (yes, 100s) of flames along with hysteria and threats of DDOS attacks. "Many enemies, much honor" is not a means of putting food on the table, or even having a nice day, but an unfortunate drawback to the public expression of controversial thoughts.
Of course, maybe the Web and the blogsphere can get along just fine without a relatively small group of seasoned writers, and perhaps much of the Web would even suffer an organic rejection of those who have stooped to "selling content"!
Thank you for thinking about how to improve the quality of content. I hope you'll posting more on this.
Flair
· 2 years ago
Oh wait'll the boys at Digg see this one. Yes, the little insufferable boys who post and digg and comment in a stinking pile of their own self-importance. They're not going to like this. Not one bit.
Some of the best and most useful content on the internet I found is from users submitting their own content.
Aloha!
destroy the environment for fu
· 2 years ago
how is this article, itself, not an instance of digg blog-spam? It lacks original content, restating the obvious.
More M
· 2 years ago
Very interesting post and I also agree that if the smaller bloggers don't get their stuff out their on sites like digg we will only ready what the few at the top have to say.
How is this different than mainstream media?
Levi Blackman
· 2 years ago
I try to Digg myself from time to time. I post the best my website has to offer in hopes that others will Digg it also. Stuff I think is kinda crappy I don't dig, but I thought that was the point.
How else are we supposed to find other stuff to digg if we don't all post our own stuff? Do people really look down on it?
Daniel
· 2 years ago
Like a few others here, I've dealt with this recently. I wrote a post about the fact that I was being downvoted on Reddit simply for submitting my own stuff.
The question I pose is "How else does one suggest I build this blog's readership without self-promotion?"
Thanks for getting this out there. Hopefully the stigma will lift a bit.
Daniel - Hibernation9
jonathan
· 2 years ago
I'm making an open-source javascript library... I submitted it to digg myself some time ago and it was promoted to first page. However, I had some flames in the comments about the self-submission crap... I totally agree with you :)
Viv Tan
· 2 years ago
Your article is just what I needed to read. I do spend quite an amount of time and effort into my writing for my blog. Sometimes I have a social message and I hope more people can read about it, and I really want to know what people think. But I have a classic problem, I'm a relatively new blogger and nobody quite know about the existence of my blog yet. I have been comtemplating on this issue in the last 2 days, and you've just answered it! Thanks a lot! Really appreciate it!
Han
· 2 years ago
I see nothing wrong with people submitting themselves, otherwise most sites wouldn't get noticed. I trust that the digg community knows a shit article when it reads it and burys it with the rest - who submits it is irrelevent.
elamb
· 2 years ago
Very well put. I submitted my stuff to digg and it actually ended up being pretty useful for some folx.
gordon
· 2 years ago
I spam the hell out of everything I possibly can. But donald trump said something like "if you don't tell people how sucessful you are, no one will ever know."
sometimes what you are doing is so far ahead of everyone else, they aren't going to know to love it.
I am a fan of learning about programming scripts and how they work. http://www.allsyntax.com was a good help for me. Good articles and the people in the forums were very helpful as well. It is a web 2.0 site, and I can learn from the various articles that provide information from different perspectives. My 2 cents ~ *giggle*
william
· 2 years ago
I agree. I write about 2 or 3 new articles every day and digg them and submit them to reddit. I don't feel bad about it because else, how would anyone ever know I had something new to say?
Thanks for this article. I've had this feeling of being afraid to submit my own content to Digg after reading all the nasty comments others left. No more! Let's change the 'standard'.
Blogger
· 2 years ago
Is anyone still feel fear of being self-promoted? If you think so, think again.
Mark
· 2 years ago
I find it frustrating when I submit articles to digg only to find someone else write on the same topic and it gets to the front page of digg even though I thought my article was better. :(
Oh well gotta get trying.
Steve
· 2 years ago
Agreed. Submitting your own content is just that..submitting. Let the readers make the judgement calls. I've been banned from Digg for submitting a whole 2 articles I wrote myself. Wow, what a crime. Frankly, I don't give a rat's. Digg are being overtaken by a multitude of far more enlightened sites, so who needs them?
"Yes, the little insufferable boys who post and digg and comment in a stinking pile of their own self-importance. They’re not going to like this. Not one bit."
I've submitted my best blog articles to both Digg and Reddit. And what do I get? Flack over the content. I tell ya, people are so mean that I understand why writers don't submit their own writing.
timle53
· 2 years ago
I'm relatively new to reddit and blogging and was wondering about just this topic. I agree and very well put.
TheDog
· 1 year ago
All the individual idiots who vote on submissions at Digg and Reddit believe that they alone are arbiters of what constitutes good content.
I have seen many brilliant submissions made by countless self-submitters down-voted or buried just because they don't meet the low demands of the morons at Digg or Reddit.
If it ain't LOLcat or some stupid picture of a woman not in a Burqua labeled as NSFW, those jokers don't want to know about it.
The sites that self-submit that kind of material always seem to win praise from the average Reddit or Digg user. The truly great self-submitted stuff is always ignored.
Besides, Reddit and Digg users who do visit sites that are linked usually don't pay the bills. They are like drunken sailors on shore leave, they visit the whore house, see what's on offer, ejaculate quickly, and then leave without paying and never return. (Translated, Redditors and Diggers visit a website, look at it quick and make a snap judgement, and then leave without actually reading the article or contributing to ad revenue and never come back.)
Who needs that kind of visitor to a website.
LTE
· 1 year ago
I just launched a new blog that I hope will help some others fight this ''publicity'' problem. It's a humor blog that I just put up this week. I'm willing to trade diggs on digg.com or possibly another suggested site and I'm looking forward to doing something special? We haven't completely worked out the logistics yet, but we'd like to get authors of humor sites to submit one piece of original material in to us which is line with their own site's humor and a post linking to us on their site, in exchange, we'll publish the material with their name or writing alias, web address and an ad for their content.
If the person becomes a regular contributor for us that we post from, we'll add them to the list of preferred blogs on the right of our site if they do the same. If you go to our site and want to try this, we're looking for our second post, we're already on digg, technorati and stumbleupon for our first post and have one blogger from another site contributing and willing to help digg our future posts as we'll do for them when they ask. We're all set up and ready to go. Hopefully, it'll be a win/win. We'll take only content we think is worthwhile and we'll then have some fairly straightforward motivation to promote it for both of us. Get in touch with me at lazythirdeye@yahoo.com if you're interested and we'll try to coordinate something, we're still trying to work out the idea. Any ideas on how to make something like that work Mr. Miessler? It would be an avenue to preclude the self submission problem.
You can modify the style to compliment your page. Sometimes things like links or headers won't work in this textbox. To fix that just replace p with div. May not be what you're looking for but I thought I would share it.
Thomas
· 1 year ago
By the way thanks for the article. I was wondering about submitting my own stuff.
Wes
· 1 year ago
That is an interesting article. I'm going to submit my most recent blog post now! It's good.
Ali
· 1 year ago
Very good post I must say. I have been recently criticized by a reddit user that I submit content from same website. I told him that I don't sell any Viagra or pills and only submit legit stories and news. I have quoted your post there to make my point.
Vineet Govinda Gupta
· 1 year ago
Excellent post!
Web Servers Overview
· 1 year ago
Learn what is a web server and how it stores the websites and process the incoming HTTP requests from the client browsers
http://businesscoaching.typepa
· 1 year ago
the natural temptation is to be very reluctant to submit your own stuff because of the social media thought police who immediately jump on you.
I found your article reassuring.
jhonmansteve
· 1 year ago
mail sun site glass trust green global me boat steven free wood
Live Your Way
· 1 year ago
Daniel, great article. Promoting your works online is a chore and not promoting them on the premiere sights available would be shortchanging yourself. Thanks for acknowledging what everyone is already doing...now they do not have to feel guilty for it :)
Alan
· 1 year ago
Digg banned my domain for submitting my own content.
At least thats the only reason i can think of since they didn't actually say, but simply stated that "some users" reported my blog as spam and so digg decided to ban my blog.
My blog had only been alive for about 4 weeks before this, I had only written 12 posts or so. The posts certainly were not spam, as each one took me several hours to write and contained either my opinion on an issue or a list that i thought others would either find helpful or fun.
I had no ads on my blog so I wasn't making any money from any of my posts (except for amazon affiliate links that I had in my lists of books).
At the very least I would have liked to know the reasons why my domain was banned without warning if for no other reason than to actually find out if i was doing something wrong without knowing it. I am aware that ignorance is no excuse, but the "if you don't know than we won't tell you" attitude is completely unhelpful.
FhelZone
· 1 year ago
I don't find it wrong too.....
Charlie
· 1 year ago
I have been subitting my own content to Digg and Propeller for a while now and see nothing wrong with it. Does anybody know, if you get banned because somebody without a life complains about spamming, will this effect your Google ranking?
Zach Conn
· 10 months ago
This is a very encouraging post. You've explained my thinking in a very eloquent manner. I'll be remembering your arguments here the next time this came up.
I took your advice and submitted my latest post to reddit, and I got around 30 unique hits--that's pretty good around my lonely corner of the web!
Mike
· 9 months ago
Great article. I never really considering self-submitting my own stuff always felt kinda pompous about it. Will do in the future.
Junaid
· 9 months ago
Gr8 post... Thanks Daniel Miessler for sharing with us...
All Comments
http://emerging.org/calling-all-economists-part-2/
(Everyone likes to complain about how the market's going to collapse, I'm trying to figure out how to benefit from the recent short calls.)
However, I submitted it, and didn't feel it was right to troll it around too much. Of course, as a result, it didn't go anywhere, so I guess I learned my lesson!
I submit the majority of my content (quality, original content mind you) to reddit and digg. When I read people's complaints about blogspam, it's hard not to take it personally. The only thing I can say for people like me is that the original content we create is vastly more valuable than the true blogspam we see so much.
Another thing that I do is click the most interesting adword on an article I like. I usually don't purchase from the ad, but it has happened.
I've been writing professionally for about 20 years. Aside from the volume of writing that's been published, my HD also contains hundreds of unfinished pieces on politics, culture, economics, and contemporary history, including a lot of reports written when I was "standing there", an eye-witness -- stuff that might interest people. So IMO the central point IMO is dead accurate, and well-thought:
"... Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit."
As to making that happen ... perhaps this is v1.0, and deserves some more development? This piece of reasoning is not working for me, and I suspect won't work for others:
"... I attempted to do this by showing how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing and submitting it from your site to try and steal ad traffic."
The difficulty is that the term "spamming" was in use before paid ads even existed online, and in fact self-promotion is exactly what it did/does mean, whether on Usenet or Digg. That meaning has a lot of inertia, and will not be changed easily. Perhaps you can come up with a different logic to encourage self-submitting, perhaps even a new word or phrase that will differentiate it from spam?
In a relevant side-thought, this comment made me wince:
"... Have the balls to submit your own material if you think it’s worth reading."
I'm not wincing personally, but on behalf of people who earn a living directly from writing (selling the content) rather than by advertising (using content to sell ads). The two business models are quite different, or so it seems to me, having done both. If I were primarily in the business of selling ads, no doubt I'd be finishing up the unfinished articles right now, reckoning that traffic=Googlecheck. As it is, I don't mind posting unpublished work without payment -- I do it quite often, without fanfare -- but many of the articles are just PITAs waiting to get me slashdotted/dugg, leading to a few thank you notes borne by hundreds (yes, 100s) of flames along with hysteria and threats of DDOS attacks. "Many enemies, much honor" is not a means of putting food on the table, or even having a nice day, but an unfortunate drawback to the public expression of controversial thoughts.
Of course, maybe the Web and the blogsphere can get along just fine without a relatively small group of seasoned writers, and perhaps much of the Web would even suffer an organic rejection of those who have stooped to "selling content"!
Thank you for thinking about how to improve the quality of content. I hope you'll posting more on this.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_Reddit_Create_an...
Aloha!
How is this different than mainstream media?
How else are we supposed to find other stuff to digg if we don't all post our own stuff? Do people really look down on it?
http://www.hibernation9.com/blog/downvoted_on_r...
The question I pose is "How else does one suggest I build this blog's readership without self-promotion?"
Thanks for getting this out there. Hopefully the stigma will lift a bit.
Daniel - Hibernation9
I submitted it to digg myself some time ago and it was promoted to first page.
However, I had some flames in the comments about the self-submission crap... I totally agree with you :)
sometimes what you are doing is so far ahead of everyone else, they aren't going to know to love it.
http://www.cheapgreencar.com
-William
www.sugarattack.com
If you think so, think again.
I find it frustrating when I submit articles to digg only to find someone else write on the same topic and it gets to the front page of digg even though I thought my article was better. :(
Oh well gotta get trying.
Agreed. Submitting your own content is just that..submitting. Let the readers make the judgement calls. I've been banned from Digg for submitting a whole 2 articles I wrote myself. Wow, what a crime. Frankly, I don't give a rat's. Digg are being overtaken by a multitude of far more enlightened sites, so who needs them?
"Yes, the little insufferable boys who post and digg and comment in a stinking pile of their own self-importance. They’re not going to like this. Not one bit."
Right on Flair. Couldn't agree more.
drondr
Good point. And just to show you that I agree, here are four posts I'm actually quite proud of :
- 10 biggest threats for the Internet (http://e-mino.blogspot.com/2007/11/10-biggest-t...)
- top 10 dead celebrities I'd like to meet (http://e-mino.blogspot.com/2007/11/top-10-dead-...)
- The power of google (http://e-mino.blogspot.com/2007/08/power-of-goo...)
- a tribute to Jackie Wright (http://e-mino.blogspot.com/2007/10/tribute-to-j...>
Comments are welcome !
I've submitted my best blog articles to both Digg and Reddit. And what do I get? Flack over the content. I tell ya, people are so mean that I understand why writers don't submit their own writing.
I'm relatively new to reddit and blogging and was wondering about just this topic. I agree and very well put.
All the individual idiots who vote on submissions at Digg and Reddit believe that they alone are arbiters of what constitutes good content.
I have seen many brilliant submissions made by countless self-submitters down-voted or buried just because they don't meet the low demands of the morons at Digg or Reddit.
If it ain't LOLcat or some stupid picture of a woman not in a Burqua labeled as NSFW, those jokers don't want to know about it.
The sites that self-submit that kind of material always seem to win praise from the average Reddit or Digg user. The truly great self-submitted stuff is always ignored.
Besides, Reddit and Digg users who do visit sites that are linked usually don't pay the bills. They are like drunken sailors on shore leave, they visit the whore house, see what's on offer, ejaculate quickly, and then leave without paying and never return. (Translated, Redditors and Diggers visit a website, look at it quick and make a snap judgement, and then leave without actually reading the article or
contributing to ad revenue and never come back.)
Who needs that kind of visitor to a website.
I just launched a new blog that I hope will help some others fight this ''publicity'' problem. It's a humor blog that I just put up this week. I'm willing to trade diggs on digg.com or possibly another suggested site and I'm looking forward to doing something special? We haven't completely worked out the logistics yet, but we'd like to get authors of humor sites to submit one piece of original material in to us which is line with their own site's humor and a post linking to us on their site, in exchange, we'll publish the material with their name or writing alias, web address and an ad for their content.
If the person becomes a regular contributor for us that we post from, we'll add them to the list of preferred blogs on the right of our site if they do the same. If you go to our site and want to try this, we're looking for our second post, we're already on digg, technorati and stumbleupon for our first post and have one blogger from another site contributing and willing to help digg our future posts as we'll do for them when they ask. We're all set up and ready to go. Hopefully, it'll be a win/win. We'll take only content we think is worthwhile and we'll then have some fairly straightforward motivation to promote it for both of us. Get in touch with me at lazythirdeye@yahoo.com if you're interested and we'll try to coordinate something, we're still trying to work out the idea. Any ideas on how to make something like that work Mr. Miessler? It would be an avenue to preclude the self submission problem.
Here is an idea for offsetting your text other than the quote. I found this on another website (http://www.scratch99.com/2007/06/wordpress-simp...). It's a simple textbox.
(HTML)
Your text
(CSS)
.textbox2 {padding:2px 6px 4px 6px; color: #555555; border: #dddddd 2px solid}
You can modify the style to compliment your page. Sometimes things like links or headers won't work in this textbox. To fix that just replace p with div.
May not be what you're looking for but I thought I would share it.
By the way thanks for the article. I was wondering about submitting my own stuff.
That is an interesting article. I'm going to submit my most recent blog post now! It's good.
Very good post I must say. I have been recently criticized by a reddit user that I submit content from same website. I told him that I don't sell any Viagra or pills and only submit legit stories and news.
I have quoted your post there to make my point.
Excellent post!
Learn what is a web server and how it stores the websites and process the incoming HTTP requests from the client browsers
the natural temptation is to be very reluctant to submit your own stuff because of the social media thought police who immediately jump on you.
I found your article reassuring.
mail sun site glass trust green global me boat steven free wood
Daniel, great article. Promoting your works online is a chore and not promoting them on the premiere sights available would be shortchanging yourself. Thanks for acknowledging what everyone is already doing...now they do not have to feel guilty for it :)
Digg banned my domain for submitting my own content.
At least thats the only reason i can think of since they didn't actually say, but simply stated that "some users" reported my blog as spam and so digg decided to ban my blog.
My blog had only been alive for about 4 weeks before this, I had only written 12 posts or so. The posts certainly were not spam, as each one took me several hours to write and contained either my opinion on an issue or a list that i thought others would either find helpful or fun.
I had no ads on my blog so I wasn't making any money from any of my posts (except for amazon affiliate links that I had in my lists of books).
At the very least I would have liked to know the reasons why my domain was banned without warning if for no other reason than to actually find out if i was doing something wrong without knowing it. I am aware that ignorance is no excuse, but the "if you don't know than we won't tell you" attitude is completely unhelpful.
I don't find it wrong too.....
I have been subitting my own content to Digg and Propeller for a while now and see nothing wrong with it.
Does anybody know, if you get banned because somebody without a life complains about spamming, will this effect your Google ranking?
I took your advice and submitted my latest post to reddit, and I got around 30 unique hits--that's pretty good around my lonely corner of the web!
You get banned for doing it twice.