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Maybe another channel for self-promotion, articles & courses? I feel guilty myself for „spamming” sometimes, and to be honest I avoid it as much as I can (and balance my involvement here so there are still more „me helping” than „me promoting”, but on the other hand - for independent engineers it’s the only way to be recognised & share something which can help others. We can also think about voting for the best Articles, Courses or Self-promo so once in 2 weeks the best materials are being published in general channel. What do you think about it?

+1 for a separate channel for sharing content people/company authored themselves. I think it'd be fine to leave this channel open for people initiating a discussion by sharing an article they read, but obviously having the author/company do it themselves is obviously biased.

It feels like opinions are divided about the links taking over. Personally, I enjoy checking out the diverse content, it's neat seeing different ways folks tackle different issues. I would like to see self promotion split in different categories so it would help newcomers to navigate the different aspect of platform eng and related concept such as IDPortal/IDPlatform, devx, infrastructure automation, etc

I think I would like more discussion. None or few of the links are beneficial to beginners or newbies like myself. Or maybe we need a NEWBIE channel so we don't get lumped in with expert discussions

Newbie channel <3 that is a great idea!

IMO, too many channels will be hard to follow. I like scrolling the general channel and looking what have been said every 2 or 3 days. Yes, self promotion should probably be moved into a dedicated channel. But let’s be honest, moving them to another channel is like putting them into a trash 😄 In general, posts that don’t bring any value should be discarded and not posted anywhere. I know that I’m also guilty but I always try to bring value when I post something. Otherwise, I do prevent myself.

I am bit more positive about „The trash” theory, however I am usually an optimist :) I am going to visit that channel to look for some interesting Articles for newsletters I help to create. I hope I won’t be the only person voting though :D

I don’t think a separate channel would be exactly “trash” but it definitely decreases the value of link sharing. The issue at the moment is that the rate of link sharing is definitely drowning out the ability to have discussions and conversations in General. And a large number of the links shared are clearly just self promo from people who otherwise don’t engage in the community. Last year there was lots of organic discussions all the time, but the last few months - it’s basically just 90% outbound links and self promo

I agree, it wouldn't be "the trash" exactly. Maybe it could be named "linksharing" or "showandtell" (like in the Gophers slack) or "selfpromo" or "links" ... I don't know how Slack works honestly, but to not make it a hidden blackhole, the channel could be in the list of channels one gets joined automatically when they sign up. I think people have good intentions and even when it's a simple link sharing message, there usually is an initial paragraph trying to prompt some discussion... but I feel it's not organic. IMHO, things usually get more engagement when they are shared by others (they found it useful enough to take the time to share). It's actually a guideline in GitLab's Handbook that I find very useful.