The quality of things being self promoted will on average be lower than that of content being posted by other people. (If your posting other people's content, it's because you think it's good, if you are posting yours it's just because you made it)

This isn't necessarily a problem, in a small community it adds content and helps the poster grow their skills. But in a larger community it can result in a lot of low quality content.

It's called the Attention Economy. Getting peoples attention is so important today that it's seen as a commodity to be bought and sold. You're question is equivalent to asking why it's so hard to find gold.

I think it's because the Internet is paid for in large part by self promotion via ads, so free self promotion is discouraged in favor of paid self promotion.

It makes it easier IMO, have you tried self promoting IRL? It's a lot harder than on the Internet.

Things like that exist. Hacker News has a monthly "Who's Hiring" thread, lots of forums have advertising sections, etc.

Title talks about "the internet", your text talks about "social media" - and threads so seemingly a subset of social media.

The internet doesn't make it hard. It's incredibly easy. Sending emails is easy. Hosting a website is easy. Posting to platforms is easy.

Platforms and communities restrict - through their own rules - what they deem acceptable within their own scope. That's more about defining scope than "making it hard".

Reasonable self promotion is often accepted on reddit and lemmy. Blatant advertising is not. Be part of the community, or run an ad for an ad. Be a good participant rather than a spammer.

One of the first popular lemmy communities was one for announcing and therein promoting your own communities.

It is really easy to self promote. The problem is that it is easy for everyone else to self promote as well.

Did you have a question or are you informing us that we can use the internet to promote our projects?

From the looks of things, you're an artist who doesn't know how to promote themselves on the internet. I have an idea: don't. Build up your body of work, present it in public at a gallery. Do something locally that will get eyes on your artwork. Do a huge wall mural. Do a big guerilla piece of artwork involving a group of people. If you're a musician, you should be playing shows, not worrying about your online presence.

Art is consumed and spit out by the internet faster than you can say "artistically bankrupt". It won't garner you much attention to advertise and promote your art online.

Make a sublemmy for your stuff; people who are interested will follow it.

Make highlights on insta containing your various projects.

It's not about the promotion, it's about how and where it's done.

As an OF girl in a saturated market I feel this 😂 but thanks to capitalisation it’s hard for anyone to promote themselves, because websites and companies would rather sell time and space to advertisers rather than allow space for independent creators / artists / musicians / whoever to promote themselves. I think the internet has made it simultaneously easier and harder for unknown artists etc to show the world what they’ve got. The barrier to get yourself out there is much lower (just make some social media pages and upload your stuff) but the barrier to actually be seen by the right people is much higher (find the right hashtags, somehow go viral, stroke of luck?) and while you want to connect with the right people you’re also cautious of being too spammy. Not sure what the answer is as it depends on what you’re trying to promote, but I personally am much happier to be “advertised to” by independent creators, artists than I am by billion dollar companies or someone who wants me to drink their weight loss shakes

Big banks hate little banks