The Reddit self-promo survival guide
Reddit will send you more of the right people than any directory, and it removes more founder posts than any other channel on this site. Both facts have the same cause: subreddits are run by volunteers who have seen ten thousand people exactly like you.
The three ways a post dies
1The automod filter
Fires in seconds on account age, karma, link domains, or banned phrases. You'll usually get a bot comment explaining it — read the comment, it names the exact rule.
2The mod queue
A human looks at it within a few hours. This is where 'is this a person or an ad' gets decided, and it's decided on your comment history as much as your post.
3The silent sink
The post stays up but gets no distribution, because it was reported and downvoted early. Nothing tells you. This is the most common outcome and the one people misread as 'Reddit doesn't work'.
What actually gets you through
Every rule on every subreddit is a proxy for one question: is this person here, or are they here to get something. You can't fake the answer, but you can stop accidentally signalling the wrong one.
| Signal a mod checks | What kills you | What passes |
|---|---|---|
| Account history | Account created this month, three posts, all links to the same domain | Any comment history at all in adjacent subreddits, from before today |
| Post shape | Title is the product name and tagline. Body is the landing page. | Title is a claim or a question. Body is a story with the link at the end. |
| The link | Bare domain in the title, or a link with UTM parameters and a tracking redirect | One clean link, in the body, after something worth reading |
| Your replies | Nothing, or a copy-paste thank-you to every comment | Answering the sceptical comment properly, in public |
The rewrite that works
Take whatever you were about to post and apply these four edits. They cost you fifteen minutes and roughly triple what gets through.
- 1Lead with the problem you had, not the thing you built. 'I spent two years exporting invoices by hand' is a post. 'Introducing InvoiceFlow' is an ad.
- 2Put a number in the first line. Time spent, money lost, users, months. It buys the second line.
- 3Say what it doesn't do. One honest limitation in the body defuses the entire sceptical-comment thread before it starts, and it's the single strongest signal that a human wrote this.
- 4Move the link to the bottom, and make it the only one. No pricing page, no docs, no Twitter. One link.
[A specific, slightly annoying thing that happened to you. One or two sentences. Include a number.]
[What you tried first and why it didn't work. This paragraph is what makes you a person instead of a launch.]
So I built [thing]. It [does the one job], and that's it — it doesn't [the obvious thing people will ask about], because [honest reason].
[One sentence on who it's actually for.]
Happy to answer anything about how it works. Link: [url]Replace everything in brackets. Keep the shape.
Where the rules actually live
Sidebar rules are the published version. The enforced version is in the modmail auto-reply, the pinned 'read before posting' thread, and the last month of removed posts — which you can often see on the subreddit's own moderation log if it's public.
- Check for a weekly self-promotion thread. If one exists, posting outside it is a removal in nearly every case, and posting inside it is nearly free.
- Check for a minimum account age or karma. If you don't meet it, nothing else in this guide matters yet.
- Check whether links are allowed at all. Some subreddits are text-post-only and will remove a link post without a word.
Common questions
Can I post the same thing to five subreddits?
Not on the same day, and not with the same title. Cross-posting identical content within a short window is the most reliably detected spam pattern there is. Space them out over a fortnight and rewrite the opening for each community.
Should I message the mods first?
In small, tightly-run subreddits, yes — a two-line modmail asking whether a post about your tool is welcome gets a straight answer and often a 'post it in Saturday's thread'. In large ones it goes unread.
My post was removed. Can I repost?
Once, after fixing the stated reason, at least a week later. Reposting immediately, or after a removal you didn't address, is how a temporary removal becomes a ban.