My impression is that activity begets more activity--if there were 0 posts today, having your self-post be the post for the day is more bothersome than if there were 10 posts today. But we can look at this in a month and see how it turned out.
I don't think it is bothersome. It is a trade-off between getting less traffic because there are more posts to compete with for attention or getting more traffic because there are more visitors in total. In most sub-reddits with links and self-posts, links end up dominating
You can now submit links to LW! As the rationality community has grown up, more and more content has moved off LW to other places, and so rather than trying to generate more content here we'll instead try to collect more content here. My hope is that Less Wrong becomes something like "the Rationalist RSS," where people can discover what's new and interesting without necessarily being plugged in to the various diaspora communities.
Some general norms, subject to change: