As a former Reddit mod I always found the self-promotion rules problematic. It effectively means you can promote your stuff all you want as long as you pretend you're someone else. It would be better to encourage people to stand behind their stuff. I tried not to remove self-promotion as long as it wasn't spammy (and there's a fine line there).
In the early days it was a bonus if something was OC ("Original content"). Now it's frowned upon.
But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from being burned by everyone hustling for something. People want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or whatever.
Nice to see this attitude from a mod. I rarely have something to contribute to forums but love to read about people's projects. I've been in the position before of actually, finally, having done something I felt was worth sharing, a super rare occurrence for me, and then posted it and just getting instabanned for "self promotion".. it just feels like such a slap in the face from a community that you were enjoying being part of. Then getting into arguments with mods about it and eventually just having to unsubscribe. It hurts.
Pretending you're someone else won't help you if all you ever do is post links to the same site/youtube channel. In my experience the vast majority of the people who were banned for self-promotion weren't doing anything else on reddit except self-promotion. They'd create accounts then put in the absolute bare minimal amount of effort to get enough karma to create posts, or they'd buy up old accounts that already had some karma, but it was clear from their histories that their entire purpose in using reddit was exclusively promotion.
They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that interested them, but they had no desire to spend that time or be a useful part of any community. They just wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.
