@craig-grant, good thoughts, as always.

For me, a core part for consideration is "value." I'm not against self-promotion per se, but I prefer to think that I am adding VALUE... and I realize that is pretty subjective. I don't dig the random spamming of "please read and upvote my post" that has become more and more prominent. On the other hand, comments that actually show that someone read (or watched, as the case maybe) the content followed by a contextual comment with a link... that's a different thing.

Why do I care? Time horizon. Purely trolling for short term gains tend to kill long term viability. Think of "value" as a barrel of clean fresh drinking water. Add a few drops of muddy pond water (spammy self promotion) and it doesn't really make a difference. Add some more, and it's still probably OK. And "OK" means that people coming by (aka "potential new Steemians") will look at the barrel and think "Yeah, there's drinking water here!" and join. However, if you just keep adding dirty pondwater, eventually the new people are going to look at the barrel and think "gross! I want no part of that!" and then we have a problem. Stagnation... which tends to lead to a slow demise.

But that's a time horizon issue. Are you/we here to make short term gains, or are we here to nurture and grow a place where we can still make gains 5, 8. 10 years from now?

Not saying one is "right" or "wrong," just throwing it out there for general consideration.