The Definition Of Atheism, And Why It Is NOT A Belief

I wrote recently
about learning to differentiate between blogspam and self-submitted content
on
meritocracy-based sites like
Digg
and
Reddit. My goal was to try and reverse the negative programming we all have
towards reading self-submitted material. I attempted to do this by showing
how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing
and submitting it from your site to try and steal ad traffic.

But even more important than asking readers to
appreciate self-submitted content is the call for people
to write and submit their own. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s
socially unacceptable to self-submit.

There are thousands upon thousands of good writers out there — people who
could be improving the quality of what we see here everyday. But we won’t
ever experience what they have to offer because there’s nobody to bring it
to our attention. What are the odds that their stuff is going to be randomly
“discovered”? Not good.
The only only option is for them to drop the socially ingrained
false-modesty and present it themselves.

Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait
for it to be found.
Artisans have shows and invite lots of people, and academics submit to their
respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review
is crucial in any community that values intellectual progress.

So to all of you who think you have something to offer —
show us. Getting someone else to submit it for you is more shady than doing it
yourself, and it’s not going to be discovered on accident. If you’re doing
anything to increase your chances of being seen (SEO, word-of-mouth
promotion, etc.) you’re already playing the system. Accept this and have the
balls to submit your own material if you think it’s worth reading.

The filter for good content on these sites is the voting system,
not the source of the article. The approach that is best for the
community is to get as much content into the system as possible and allow
the voting to work for us. We cannot afford to discourage high-quality
writers with foolish source-based filtering.

If we as readers want superior content then we need become part of the
solution. That means 1) appreciating quality writing even when it’s
submitted by the author, and 2) creating and submitting our own material
without fearing the stigma of self-promotion.: