The Reddit Posting Playbook: Community Rules, Disclosure, and Genuine Participation
On Reddit, being "a Redditor with a website" and being "a website with a Reddit account" lead to completely different outcomes.
Updated
Read the current subreddit rules before mentioning a product
Reddit communities set their own rules, and those rules change. r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, and r/SideProject differ on self-promotion, links, AI-assisted content, and designated showcase threads. Read the pinned rules and recent accepted posts, then disclose your relationship to the product honestly.
Contribute before promoting; do not treat 10% as a universal rule
The often-repeated 10% guideline is a historical community heuristic, not one sitewide threshold enforced by every subreddit. The durable principle is to answer questions, join discussions, provide independent value, and build an account history that is useful even when you have nothing to promote.
Keep the CTA transparent, restrained, and rule-compliant
Requests for clicks or DMs can look like low-value promotion, but link policy depends on the community. Make the post useful on its own, disclose that you built the product, and include a link only where the current rules allow it. Never disguise a commercial relationship as an independent recommendation.
r/SideProject is more lenient, but still needs a human voice
Some communities provide a specific project-showcase format or recurring thread; others reject promotion entirely. Even when product links are welcome, explain what you built, why you built it, what went wrong, and what feedback you want instead of pasting a press release.
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