What surprised me is how quickly these kinds of projects get treated as spam across communities, even when there’s no monetization, no ads, and no growth hacks involved. In some places, just mentioning “I built a small ranking tool” seems enough to trigger suspicion or moderation.
I’m not trying to promote anything here. I’m genuinely curious about the dynamics:
- Do voting/ranking tools have a bad reputation because they’re often used for manipulation or low-effort engagement?
- Is the problem the format itself (polls, rankings), or the way they’re usually introduced?
- From a community’s point of view, what would make an experiment like this feel acceptable rather than spammy?
If you’ve built or moderated communities, or shipped small experimental tools, I’d really like to hear how you think about this.
Because most places don't want you to post self promotion and leave, that's spammy.
> I’m not trying to promote anything here.
You are, that seems to be your only intention. Your first 2 posts (out of 3) were about promoting your site and now your third post is complaining about unsuccessfully promoting your site.
You promoted your site and then left.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
The problem is that Facebook Groups decimated online forums. Those used to be great for thematic communities but became deserts and I think that whenever someone introduces something they did, whether paid or not, is now treated as spam or something one should pay for instead of discuss it(imagine how much technical talk could be had about a project you made) because the volume of messages became so low that any type of self promotion gets a lot of exposure(imagine that a forum gets 10 new posts per week, your post would then be shown for a quite some time until it would fall off the lists of recent posts) and search bots have time to index it.
FB Groups on the other hand became monetised, despite it breaking FB rules. So any link you post is instantly deleted, and you'll likely be banned, unless you pay for it to the administrator beforehand. It took these admins years to build these groups so they will not risk letting anyone use it to self promote without paying.
It's a total shitshow out there. Don't think it's just you. It's not. The internet just really sucks nowadays.