We have recently had a slew of self promotional links, this is something that we expected would happen as we continued to grow. To that end in our posting guidelines the number one rule is a ban on such posts. The reason behind this might be confusing to someone at first if they are not familiar with other communities that have similar rules in place.



Both Dag and I are metafilter users, we met through a post that i made on metafilter linking this site. One of the core values in metafilter is a rule about self linking. They have a community that religiously enforces this policy, something we hope to emulate here. The reason behind this policy is that it maintains a level of quality that would not be feasible if people merely posted their own work instead of work that was truly excellent from the view point of an impartial viewer.



Worse than this, people have been posting their own content and creating dummy accounts to then vote their projects on to the main page. This is clearly contrary to the idea of a website that finds the best video that there is to offer on the Internet. In fact we view it as nothing less than an attack on the ideology behind a community site. Without impartial voting there is little to no value in our ranking systems.



Once and for all i would like to let people know that we log IP's, when someone votes a video up it not only looks suspicious we have database crawlers that identify the activity and let us know about it. We are working on banning multiple access from individual IP's, however that presents a whole slew of other problems, popular public hot spots, roomates etc... So for now we are simply deleting videos and user accounts when we detect this activity.



If you simply MUST post your own work I would suggest taking a trip to VideoBomb, they appear to have no such policy and in fact it is part of their mission to empower the publishing of user created materials. That said, sometimes user generated content is great, if you think that your content would pass the community test then please feel free to email us, we will review it. If it's great we will post it.



I apologize if this policy seems harsh to some, however I think that the vast majority of our users understand this issue. It is crucial to our mission of maintaining quality content that this policy be ruthlessly enforced, if you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to list them here.