Nodevertising

Posting all your new writeups in the Chatterbox with the faint hope that your fellow Everythingians will vote for them and/or cool them. Not to be confused with nodes mentioned in the context of actual conversation, node-vertising is just a link screamed into the night by the noder himself, usually within seconds of the node's submission.

Sometimes it comes across as really sleazy or annoying, but every once and a while something cool gets thrown in there and I find myself thanking the noder for bringing it to my attention. But unless you actually feel like the whole Everything community is quivering with anticipation for your next node, I'd shy away from the practice. There is a New Writeups nodelet, you know.

Note: This writeup was moved here from node-vertising, which is how I used to spell it in the ancient times when I invented the term.

The pathetic and self-depreciating act of whoring your nodes around by hard linking or mentioning them excessively in the chatterbox when it has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand. This is generally due to the unfortunate and quite frequent happenstance that everyone misses your node completely in the "New Writeups" nodelet and it gets no exposure at all (thus no votes or C!'s). While discouraging, this happens to everyone and can be overcome by soft-linking, hard-linking and mentioning your writeups to your friends via /msg.

Please try to remember that some of us have thousands of writeups
that were written before the voting system was even implemented.
And you thought you had exposure problems. :P

The conventional wisdom about nodevertising is that you're not supposed to mention your own writeups in the Chatterbox at all. This is not true; reliable sources have shown me the difference between good nodevertising, bad nodevertising, and false nodevertising.

Good nodevertising is a hard link in hypothetical noder Alice's chatterbox comment to a node with a clearly relevant, informative writeup also by Alice; see also targeted node marketing. Bad nodevertising is a catbox hard link to an irrelevant writeup done merely to attract readers to a writeup. Because this can qualify as spam, some users downvote nodevertised writeups. Whining about a writeup's reputation is also considered bad nodevertising; if you have genuine questions, take them up with an editor, as I did:

wharfinger says I think on-topic is okay, and I think the rest of the administrapo agree (or damn well should agree!) but it's a community-enforced thing and some nut who "doesn't get" the point behind the idea may take issue.

Fruan says People need to learn that GTKY is about presentation, not content. That NFN is about quality, not quantity and that nodevertizing is about maintaining S/N ratio, not humility. [This writeup] hit the nail on the head.

In general, it's a bad idea to link a writeup unless you're sure that the writeup is relevant to the topic at hand. If you're going to nodevertise, disclaim it: "For more info, see my writeup in false nodevertising."

I knew all this, but what's your point?

False nodevertising can mean a hard link:

• to a node that doesn't exist (excusable),
• to a node with only trash (generally considered bad), or
• that looks promising in context but is actually a mallink to something totally off-topic in the current conversation (generally considered bad).

(No, mallinking has nothing to do with malinka.)