A short link in a community looks like an advert

You have spent three weeks in a subreddit being useful. You answered things, you were right a reasonable amount of the time, and a couple of people remember your name. Now you have something worth telling them about, and you want to know whether the community produces customers or not, so you paste a link that can be measured.

The link is bit.ly/3xKp2, and it has just cost you the three weeks.

What a short link tells people

Nobody in a community thinks "that is a tracked link, how reasonable." What they think is much faster and much worse: this person is running a campaign.

The reasoning is not unfair. An opaque redirect is what you use when you are measuring a channel, and measuring a channel is what you do when the channel is an audience rather than a community you are part of. The short link is the tell that the previous three weeks were the setup.

They may be wrong about your intent. It does not matter. Trust is other people's opinion of you, so the tell is the thing, not the intent behind it.

Trust is the thing you are building, and you can count it

The reason this is expensive rather than merely awkward is that trust is the only thing you are actually building in a community. It is what makes a later post land at all, and it is not transferable to the next community.

Three conditions have to hold before a link is earned:

• Twelve contributions since the last time you posted a link. Volume. This is the one that stops you looking like a salesperson.
• Across at least five distinct days. Recognition, which is a different thing from volume. Twelve comments in one afternoon is a single exposure event, and a burst of being helpful and then dropping a link is the exact pattern moderators are trained to spot.
• Several of them earning a reply or an upvote. This one matters most. If nothing you write gets a response, you are shouting into a feed, and more volume will not fix it. It will just make the shouting louder.

Note the window: since the last link, not since you joined. Trust is spent when you use it. The count restarts.

Two other ways this goes wrong

Asking more than you give. Under roughly a fifth of your contributions should mention anything you built. Above that, you are a salesperson with manners, and the community works it out faster than you would expect. This is measurable about yourself and almost nobody measures it.

The community you went quiet in. Build trust, launch, move on, come back six weeks later to launch the next thing. You are a stranger again, and you paid the entry cost for nothing. This is why every community you have ever worked stays on your list permanently rather than being deleted when you stop working it. Re-entering a community you abandoned means paying the entry cost twice for one launch.

So the link has to be your own

The measurement problem is real. You do need to know which community produced which customer, or you are guessing about where your mornings go. The answer is not to give up the measurement. It is to stop paying for it with the thing you went there to build.

A tracked link on your own domain reads as a link to your site, because that is what it is:

theirsite.com/?utm_source=discord&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=rails-discord

You get the same measurement with none of the tell. It is a link to your own site with campaign parameters on the end — the most ordinary thing on the web. The click is marked with the community it came from. Anyone reading the comment thread learns nothing except where the link goes.

There is nothing to install. Those parameters are standard, so your own analytics reads them without being told to, whatever you built your site with.

What we actually receive

Worth stating, because it is the second thing people ask after "will this look like spam".

Nothing. There is no script on your site and nowhere for your servers to send anything, so we never receive one of your customers — no name, no email address, no record of any kind. That is not a policy someone could revise later. There is no table here that could hold one.

The cost is real and worth stating: because nothing links a visit to a payment, we can tell you how many people a community sent you, and what a product earned, but never which community won you a particular customer.

That constraint is not incidental to the argument in this post. A tool that asked you to hand over your customer list in exchange for attribution would be asking you to pay for measurement with something else you should not spend.