Community norm question: brief text ad signatures

Proposal: Make it look less spammy by making it look official. Something like this:

About the author:

(thumbnail picture linking to profile.) Kaj is a blank working at [blank]. (S)he is

currently working on a [novel]. If you liked this post you can Flattr Kaj [here].

Where [stuff] denotes an appropriate link. If we create a standard template for such things then everybody (who wants to) can sign their posts in such a way. This will make the site look more professional, and increase flow to everyone's other projects.

(See also Vladmir_M's post)

Ads for external companies who pay you for it, no. Ads of the form "Like Kaj? See more of him." - sounds sensible.

Though I find the signatures you propose to be objectively morally acceptable, they fill me with a faint unreasonable disgust, like when I hear people justifying having a marriage for a purpose other than true love. I know that it's more practical for many people to do things differently than what I view to be the idealized norm, but I still find the idea aesthetically displeasing. I feel that a revamping of LW's profile system could reduce the need for this, because if profiles were better organized, and I actually had an interest in seeing the novel you're writing based solely on the fact that you wrote it, or Flattring you, I would go to your profile. But as it is profiles can only provide a handful of sparse links, so that's not really an option.

I also would have preferred to see this post in discussion.

Websites that feature articles by many writers often append some brief information about the author at the end of each article (or alternatively, this information appears when you click on the author's name). This often includes links to the authors' books, blogs, professional websites, etc., and is understood as merely giving information about the author, not as an endorsement of the stuff behind the links.

I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to make this a built-in feature of LW, but I don't see any reasons why people writing top-level (or even discussion) articles shouldn't append a short paragraph of this sort to their articles. The only potential problem I see is that some people might start writing worthless articles for the purposes of self-promotion, but the voting system should take care of that.

Signatures on posts, but not comments, seems like an adequate compromise to me.

I'm strongly opposed to signatures on comments, because the basic failure state of "Everyone has a 1-line signature" would dramatically increase the signal:noise ratio on a normal thread.

I'd also be very strongly opposed to any sort of commercial endorsement. "flattr me" is pushing the bounds here, but "you can read my other works here" seems acceptable. An actual shopping link (such as "You can buy my unrelated-to-LW novel here") would make me uncomfortable.

Upvoted for asking first.

I vote "ad signatures are okay on posts but not on comments".

I'd be fine with such ads by a small number of people, but I could see them making the site look spammy if more than a few adopted the style. I'd always be fine with someone 'signing' with their (1) website for those who are interested.

Limited scope meta-stuff like this should go in Discussion, IMO. As for the self-ads, I don't have a problem with it.

I voted "not to see such ads," but I feel reasonably comfortable with the "To see the novel I'm writing, click here" signature. That gives something of value to an interested reader who likes your style; it's closer in content to links to the relevant sequence than it is to advertisements.

It's also more congruent with the LW site style--they're keeping the website free of even the minimal advertisements reddit uses; taking advantage of that lack of noise to insert your own advertisements seems churlish.

Although perhaps all my objections are motivated by my perception of asking for money as low-status.

Shouldn't this be in the discussion section?

I don't know my opinion on the signatures thing, but you may also want to try kickstarter.

How did you get a list of the 1000 most-viewed LW pages?

This is a poll. (Feel free to change your vote if the discussion in the other comments changes your mind in either direction.)

Sounds good to me! All I have to add is that we should have a community norm of confining spam / self-promotion to one line per article, with no tie-ins between the article and the shoutout. Upvoted.