The problem with your question (and it's a good question) is that it can be answered on many levels... and without answering it on those many levels, you get an incomplete picture.

At the most basic level, the problem is one of parameter mismatch as described by Jaron Lanier in You Are Not A Gadget and Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational.

From Lanier's perspective, "anonymity" is a spectrum, not a binary quality, and those with more of it hold those with less of it to different standards. Consumers on the internet tend to have complete anonymity while producers on the internet have conditional anonymity - you don't know who made that Oreos commercial, but you know they work for General Mills, for example. Self-promotion from a known quantity - General Mills, Snoop Dogg, Stephen Fry - is A-OK because everyone knows it's the identified pandering to the anonymous. The anonymous pandering to the anonymous is A-OK because flashes in the pan and "viral" posts are the bread and butter of social media. But because "viral" anything is the holy grail of advertising, the anonymous internet regards all polished things not flying the banner of their creation with suspicion and hostility.

From Ariely's perspective, we hold "friends" and "vendors" in different parts of our head and when our friends act like vendors, we feel betrayed. There are two different standards for them. This is why Amway and Avon are so insidious but so successful: your friends get a pass on behaviors that you would never tolerate from a business, but they're businesses marketed through your friends. In social media, "friends" are the other anonymous hordes like ourselves. "Vendors" are those who we buy shit from. The Internet is A-OK with vendors being vendors and friends being friends but the minute a friend becomes a vendor, fuck them in the neck. That's why people go to one Tupperware Party if any.

The next level is one of cynicism. The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, providing a forum for anyone with talent. Unfortunately, it provides a forum for anyone with a talent for promotion via the Internet. I wholeheartedly recommend Ryan Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying for a concise yet sweeping analysis of the "wagging the dog" phenomenon of Internet promotion. The mile-high view is that the process is largely dishonest and craven because dishonest and craven is the most effective and efficient way to do things. Consider: Elvis "made it big" but Rebecca Black "went viral." "Virality" (not virulence, because the ad industry needs its own terminology to distance itself from the fact that it's attempting to model itself on disease) is a much-studied specialty that is all about disingenuous promotion through dishonesty and even if "the internet" can't quote chapter and verse on the deceptions, they can smell a rat. Often when there isn't one there, in fact.

But really, at the base of it, the Internet hates self-promotion because the internet doesn't know who you are and doesn't care. You can shill your shit on Facebook. You can shill your shit on Tumblr. You can shill your shit anywhere that people expect shit to be shilled... but if you try and sneak into the crowd as a shit shiller, you will be pilloried.

'member back before Facebook had business pages? 'member how pissed people got if you promoted your business on your personal page? Notice how they don't do that anymore now that you can get a business page that plays by business rules?

That's pretty much the TL;DR right there - because self-promotion breaks "the rules" of sites like, say, Reddit.

If self-serve wasn't such a star-spangled clusterfuck everything would be A-OK. But they've re-jiggered it four times now and it's still a long way from useful.

If you promote your work, there's nothing to stop it from being shit. If someone else promotes it, then at least one person must have liked it. But I think it really depends on the website. Not all social media websites have the same aims and community as Reddit.

Don't know if you saw this thread 8bit but we had an interesting discussion on the topic a while back. It's the only thread I have stickier, I found it encouraging because I did struggle with self-posting my own stuff. Felt guilty about it? Anyway, now I just think about that post and all's good.

Hubski's a little different because people who use hubski to promote themselves either also participate enough that you know them and want to see that they've done, or don't and you have to opt in to hear from them directly. We probably use different subreddits, but usually I only ever see people on Reddit get annoyed when someone is obviously just trying to sell them something. "Look at this cool thing I made which is appropriate to this subreddit" posts tend to be pretty popular.

I think rjw got close to it. It's a quality control thing. The Internet greatly lowers the barrier to shoving information in peoples' faces. It used to be - if you were a musician, you had to get a label to financially back you. Filmmaker? You had to get a studio/distributor to do so. Writer? Get published in NYT or get a publisher to pick you up. The financial barrier imposed a means of quality control.

Nowadays, anyone - no matter how crap they are - can get a link to their work or ideas in front of your eyes. Given our limited attention span, an easy way of filtering out this noise is the notion of whether content is "vouched" for or not by others. Self-posted vs posted by someone else is an quick and easy cut-off for this.

This is an issue that some sites attack in an indirect/inadvertant way (e.g. Reddit/Twitter/Soundcloud/Pandora etc.), but AFAIK no one has yet to attack (in a rigorous manner) the issue of quality control. It's a challenging problem in part, because it's so subjective.

I'd bet it's mostly due to negative attribution errors, shaped by attention seeking tactics so often found on the internet since the earliest days of mass-internet consumption.

Reddit's administration team a bunch of hypocrites at best.

Gawker journalist Adrian Chen (or Adrian802 on reddit) remains the only redditor to openly dox another redditor (Violentacrez) and entirely get away with it. No shadowban, no site-wide ban of Gawker Media domains, nothing. In fact, the only banning of Gawker Media domains came from the mod level and from how many Gawker Media links I see on various subreddits these days, my guess is that they dropped said policy after a few weeks or months.

For hosting a number of pornographic, troll and legal-grey-area subreddits - many of which were shut down over a year prior after the threat of a SomethingAwful and /r/ShitRedditSays sponsored press mailbombing campaign forced the admins to change their policies on sexualised content of minors - Mr Brutsch was fired from his programming job which mainly provided for the care of him and his sick wife, was internationally shamed by a few reputable news websites and became a national pariah to other Americans as news networks began to report on his antics under the Violentacrez pseudonym.

Then there's /r/Niggers, a racist, xenophobic, downright crude and hurtful subreddit that used to regularly brigade reddit threads, post offensive comments towards other users and whatnot. It was shut down for 'vote manipulation' after reddit got a bit of press negativity for its existence. However, other subreddits that actively engage in manipulating comment scores such as ShitRedditSays, SubredditDrama, AgainstMensRights, and Bestof haven't even been threatened for their actions. MensRights was but the admins seemed content with them making a few rule changes to prevent more vote manipulation. There's also suspicion that the admins were colluding with SRS because one of the admins who later left reddit (Intortus) is now a moderator on SRS.

In reality, the admins could and should have shut it down for breaching the Personal Information rule which has been further clarified as follows in the FAQ:

NO. reddit is a pretty open and free speech place, but it is not ok to post someone's personal information, or post links to personal information. This includes links to public Facebook pages and screenshots of Facebook pages with the names still legible. We all get outraged by the ignorant things people say and do online, but witch hunts and vigilantism hurt innocent people and certain individual information, including personal info found online is often false. Posting personal information will get you banned. Posting professional links to contact a congressman or the CEO of some company is probably fine, but don't post anything inviting harassment, don't harass, and don't cheer on or vote up obvious vigilantism.

Had the admins actually enforced this rule? We'd see a lot of other subreddits like ShitRedditSays, SubredditDrama, AgainstMensRights, PCMasterRace, Cringe, Cringepics, Circlejerk, TheRedPill, MensRights and a lot of others face the chopping block unless they change their behaviour and rules. We would have also seen /r/Niggers get shut down much sooner.

Back to the subject of 'posting your own content', two weeks ago a website called OnGamers and several of its journalists - including Rod "Slasher" Breslau - were banned from reddit over this rule and vote manipulation. Yes, they did submit quite a bit of their own content and they likely did upvote each others content actively to game the system but they were regular contributors to reddit otherwise. It wasn't until a huge outcry from /r/LeagueofLegends, /r/Starcraft, /r/Games and several other subreddits, and internal discussions between OnGamers and the admins, that the bans were reversed.

As far as I can tell, the reptile-brain reaction:

For art and songs and primary research articles and other sorts of actual ORIGINAL content: 'Neat.'

For blog posts, book reviews, and editorial: 'Who the fuck is this person who thinks their opinion is more important than everyone else's, unless they're an expert?' Unless you're an expert it's almost as if you're a wannabe Rush Limbaugh or a wannabe-but-unfunny-version-of Jon Stewart

It's the distinction between primary and secondary sources, to use a term from my field of work.

There's also a touch of 'You had to advertise this on the internet? It didn't work when you used other more legitimate-seeming methods?' Because (and I'm one of the people who thinks this too) the Internet is kind of immaterial and ephemeral in some ways; you can anonymously loose something in it, and then lose the same thing in it. Internet people don't make the same impression as people encountered offline in some ways. There's no real consequence a lot of the time from just logging off and abandoning a website. Hell, I did that with Reddit, and the folks posting to it vanished into thin air to me mentally. The internet is kind of cheap and low-effort, too.

In fact, if I decided to leave Hubski right now (which I'm not), I'd just forget that all of you exist.

There's an erotic author Reddit who writes the most amazing blogs on writing, she calls them "Wednesday Workshops". The advice in them goes for all writing, not just erotic, but she only promotes them there. Honestly, if that was all she ever posted I would be happy to see them. They are quality, relevant content.

I think the value of having an automatic second opinion is pretty important -- that is, if you're submitting a song you found somewhere, well presumably that's at least two people who like it, you and the creator. If you submit your own stuff, it's only got one guaranteed fan. Given the sheer amount of original content on reddit and everywhere else, that tiny layer of peer-review simply must exist, because most original content is bad, and can easily overwhelm small subreddits (because reddit's "democracy" system doesn't work, because democracy doesn't work, etc).

On hubski it's not a problem because we can ignore people. Although occasionally when we ignore people they can still interact with us. But presumably they can't shove their content down our gasping, wheezing throats.