This help page uses the word "overt" in the last section title and description. Personally, I have never even heard that word before, and I don't think many of the users did, as it's clearly not that common. More so, there are a lot of users that are not native English speakers.
Can it be replaced with something that is more likely to be known like "obvious" or "outright"?
I believe that it benefits everyone, including EFL learners, for documentation to use the most common of the most precise words that fit the intended meaning. Choosing a common word that isn't exactly the right meaning simply because it is common is as much a problem as choosing an obscure word simply because it is precise.
We have had several discussions about simplifying the way we write on ELL.SE, including Simple English please!. Our community has always settled on not "dumbing down" the vocabulary, but instead striving to avoid idioms, slang, and in some instances, complicated sentence structures.
So there are two issues I think we have to figure out. What is the intended meaning of
The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam.
and is 'overt' the most commonly used word that conveys that precise meaning?
Overt is defined as 'open and observable; not hidden, concealed, or secret'. It is not in my opinion interchangeable with blatant or obvious, and I don't think we should muddy the waters by trying to change the intended meaning and incorporating covert in there (that's a discussion for a different question).
In my opinion, the community tends to not like self-promotion in general, and tends to downvote overt self-promotion because they notice it and not necessarily because it's overt. I think 'overt' is the correct word to use there, with 'obvious' being the runner-up. I don't think a replacement word is going to add or detract significantly from the message, so I don't think we should change the wording.
I came across a page describing Stack Overflow Content principles and think it captures fairly well the style of writing that is easier for fluent non-native speakers to understand.
Although this question was downvoted because people disagreed with the suggestion to change the wording, it is useful for people to point out parts of the site where the text might be difficult to understand.
I see some benefit in using not-so-common words.
Personally I am not a native English speaker. Stack Overflow and especially this site have helped me to understand and write better English (probably this post gets redacted too, but that doesn't stop me from learning).
The meaning of the word overt is clear from the context, so users that really care about the specific meaning of the word can always use a dictionary, like I just did. And that is a good thing in my opinion. The text is clear on itself, even without (understanding) the word overt, so no harm done.
I am in favor of replacing the word, but not because of its alleged obscurity.
"Avoid overt self-promotion" implies that it's only about obvious self-promotion. However, covert self-promotion is just as bad - arguably even worse.
I suggest we change it to "direct" or "blatant". There may be better words.
My case for using the phrase "avoid direct self-promotion" is that there is a valid form of indirect self-promotion. If a user writes many good posts, it is supposed to reflect well upon that user. And this is a valid form of promoting one's own.
Maybe we should re-phrase the wording to say, "avoid promoting your own work".
