How do you feel about people self promoting themselves? (Also GIVEAWAYS HERE!)

Meh, I'm fine with self promoting.
Edit: Those people promoting their singing on Youtube annoys me. (mainly arrogant ones)Honestly I'm sure a portion of them are actually good, but they just straight up annoy me.
Edit 2: Plot twist: You created this to promote your Youtube channel.

Eh. Most of the time I report them. I leave it to support to find out if the ads were approved beforehand and resolve the tickets accordingly.

Its sometimes alright to self-promote. You have to do something.

Bribing us with your elbows to drive the consensus in your favour?

As long as you don't go overboard spamming your links it's fine to me. And of course, if you want to promo your Youtube channel on Steamgifts, it must be related to gaming, else I will mind :P Eg. Advertising a singing channel here, because if you want to do that, go to a singing forum goddammit.

I don't really care all to much. Its optional if you want to help them out or completely ignore them. I think most people only look at the greenlight and kickstarter promotions and ignore the ones like youtube and streams.

I don't mind it but that doesn't mean I'm going to check it out. For example twitch or youtube channels, odds are I wont check them out because I'm not into watching gameplay unless its a trailer or wanting to see if its a game I'll like.

If its greenlight or so I'll check them out and most of the time vote up. They paid the 100$ to get on greenlight and put time into their game so I always vote yes, unless the game looks like a monkey did it then of course I vote no but I honestly haven't seen many of those and I've voted for 1,000+ games on greenlight.

I don't mind as long as they are not obnoxious, pushy about it, or doing something deceptive or exploitative.

Welp. Just realized I uploaded this on my wrong account.(Other account has the same name.)

Why the fuck do I two accounts on one youtube account? That's pretty retarded. Fucking google man.

I just don't care about them. I'd occasionally check them if it seems interesting but it rarely happens.

People have to get attention somehow, so I try to remain neutral towards them. I do really hate people who basically say, "Join this group, vote yes, and you get the game", though. Particularly when the game doesn't even seem to be good. It is also sometimes slightly annoying if they only joined the community for the sake of promoting their game. Referral links to a contest of sorts is fine, in my opinion. Most people bypass the referral anyways and it's usually good information.

It's nice when they make their advertisement interesting in some way, though.

I'm not against promotions, if they aren't faked or cheated or with stupid rules :-/
So, it's the matter of trust for me - once I've seen a couple of Twitch promotions with "giveaways", cheapest bundle games once in hour.

I usually pass them by. Nice try getting me to click that giveaway link.

When the personal promotion is done properly and in good taste, I don't mind. If a giveaway is made and you want to use the description to tell us about your channel, or your greenlight game, or whatever, that's fine. If it's related to computer gaming and the mods OK'd it, then this is the right place for it. On the other hand, if you attempt to force us to jump through additional hoops, or worse yet, try to trick us into participating in something, then that will piss me off to no end. We should have the freedom to say "No."

"Make your comment AT LEAST or 2 long."

At least what? 2 letters? 2 words? Sentences? Paragraphs? PAGES?!

I think you meant at least 1 or 2 sentences long. :-P Often I think faster than I type, so my typing comes out weird, so I can totally identify!

As for self-promotion, it's tricky. Lots of people seem to come here to dump promotion links, but aren't actually part of the community. Sorry stranger, I don't feel more inclined to vote for your game, thanks for the giveaway anyway. You know what I mean?

I saw a promotion giveaway in the public area recently. Something like 5000+ entries. In the description, the giver asked for people to join their group. The group had less than 100 members. Promotions don't seem to be that effective.

If someone gives away a game here and says "Please vote for my greenlight game" I'll at least check it out (if I enter the giveaway). It might be a good game.

If someone gives away their game for voting on their greenlight, I'm LESS likely to vote for it. Why do that if it's a good game? It should stand on its own.

If someone is promoting a youtube channel, I might watch a video. I have a lot of subscriptions already, so they better be something special if they want me to come back.

But if someone from the SG community whose constant involvement was enough for me to recognize their name, and they came in and said "Hey, I made this game" you better believe I'd play it.

Whoops, this is turning into 2 pages after all.

I don't mind self-promotion really. It's not like it takes forever to read what they write. As long as the forum isn't flooded with that kind of stuff, I'm okay with it. The youtube comments or annotations that mislead people into clicking kinda vex me though. All in all, though, it's not as bad as watching advertisements, and I'm used to those already.

Those automatic bot stories talking about certain phony/scammy websites are a different story though.

For me it's either or. It really really depends on what the person is promoting. When it's about a new game or an indie person trying to get his game known I don't mind it as much and even take a look at it. When it's someone YouTube/Twitch channel I tend to ignore them even when they add the ol 'extra giveaway if you subscribe to my channel' bit. Not sure if about everyone but I don't like the idea of having to commit to something to get something else only to later on unsubscribe once the contest is done, nor like the ones that want your Facebook and other stuff.

I will note though, everyone's gotta start somewhere and sometimes using this site and other places to do self promotions are inexpensive. If it's available and you gotten the attention of one person, you at least have someone to spread news of your promotion about.

if someone is kind enough to share something with you, i don't really mind. this site is good chance for self promoting, but you don't need to back them up after all. but please not on the forum dear self promoters.

Theres a lot of different types of self promotions which make me feel here and there. Any promotion that forces you to "like this" "add this" or "Share this" needs to go into a hole and die. Especially ones where people essentially use you to get something good for example your green light example since its basically cheating the system making your game greenlight because of a promotion and not because its any good.

I do however really like the ones that make a giveaway and say, for example in the comments section sup guys, giveaway is for everyone, but were also promoting X, if it interests you please check it out. I like them, its sort of like a free promotional giveaway but you don't HAVE to do anything and you don't have to like something just to go in the draw for a game, its up to you if you want to like or greenlight it or not.

TLDR

Normal informative self promotion are fine, FORCED promotions are NOT.

Self promotion has always existed, it's just now that people has the opportunity to focus more on their intended targets.

A new developer can spend money on ads on a blog or even a magazine and not get a 1/10th of the attention/followup he would get by giving his game away to a few people here, plus by doing so he plants the seeds of a community for his game so he gets far more value for his money than by spamming ads in blogs. Same with youtube channels.

I really don't think that's a big problem if it doesn't end up filling the site with spam: a community of gamers gets more games and the chance to discover new developers/projects(if they bother to click the links, that should never be mandatory) and the developers get to spend their money and resources in exactly the kind of people they want to target, without giving facebook/google/amazon a cut of said money for far less impactfull results.

TL;DR: I don't think it's bad while it doesn't negatively impact the quality of the site(in this case steamgifts) and it's not abused.

I don't mind really as long as it's done properly. Like if there's a giveaway that uses the comment space for promoting something and it's not deceptive in any way.

I rarely look at Youtube, Twitch or the like but most of the time I'll have a look at Greenlight games. (Won't upvote a game I wouldn't like to play though.)

Well, everyone has to start somewhere, and as long as the request is not something like "GO LIKE MY YOUTUBE HERPADERP" and instead, something a bit more....welcoming, like a proper introduction, or a forum post explaining what the channel is about. Also, if the channel is any good at all, then those early views might just as well push the subscriber count to those interested (after all, word of mouth is usually what drives youtube channels to their glory).

When it comes down to referrals, or contests, i'm not quite fond of them to be honest. I'm not one for cheating.

Greenlight games are something i prefer to simply stay away from, since it's REALLY easy to circumvent that "restriction" by simply doing that (asking everyone to join, offer the game for free for those who upvoted), and having a terribad game ending up on steam, as it has already happened before.

Kickstarters have a very similar effect (and as well, i usually ignore them), though the risk of it being in the same situation is much less, as you have to pledge and pay a certain amount of money, which makes people think twice about mindlessly doing something. Regardless of that, if a game on kickstarter is actually any good/any promising, you won't be hearing from it from a simple user, you'll be reading that from a piece of journalism/news on steam/facebook/etc. Good stuff is passed around, bad stuff, doesn't.

(the lack of the replies feature is breaking my legs, i'll bookmark it to see responses).

I think it is okay. I mean in the End they Give away a Game.
Why shouldnt they then not be allowed to advertise something beside it.
So for me its okay as long as they dont try to force u to vote, or something else.