Why subreddits ban promotion at all
Because they are drowning in it. A moderately sized subreddit gets dozens of promotional posts a week from people who have never read it, and a community that lets them all through stops being worth reading within a month. The rule is not hostility to founders; it is the maintenance that keeps the room alive.
This matters for how you respond to it. The moderators are volunteers protecting something they built, and the version of you that is welcome is the one who is obviously a member. The version that gets banned is the one who treated the sub as a distribution list.
The rules are not where you think
Every sub publishes rules at `reddit.com/r/<name>/about/rules`, and many put the real detail in the wiki or a pinned post instead. Read all three. Then read the enforcement, which is a different thing: sort the sub by new and count the [removed] posts, and look at what AutoModerator says when it removes one.
The rules also differ in kind, not just in strictness. Some subs ban links but allow you to name a product. Some allow promotion only in a weekly thread. Some allow it if you have a minimum karma or account age. Some allow founders to answer questions but not to post. "No self-promotion" is four different policies wearing the same words.
The silent failure modes
The thing that makes this expensive is that Reddit does not always tell you. There are several ways a comment can be invisible to everyone but you:
- AutoModerator removal — your comment looks fine on your profile and does not exist in the thread.
- A domain filter — the sub silently removes anything linking to your site, forever, including mentions by other people.
- A karma or account-age gate that eats the comment before a human ever sees it.
- A shadowban at the Reddit level — everything you post is invisible sitewide.
How to check whether you are actually visible
Open the thread in a private window, logged out, and find your comment. If it is not there, it was removed. This takes ten seconds and almost nobody does it, which is why people spend weeks commenting into a void.
If you suspect a sitewide shadowban, check your profile logged out. If your posts are not there either, that is what it is — appeal through Reddit’s account support rather than making a second account, because ban evasion is the one thing that turns a recoverable situation into a permanent one.
What a ban actually costs
A subreddit ban costs you that community, usually permanently, and moderators talk to each other — a domain that gets filtered in one large sub in a niche often shows up in the filter lists of its neighbours.
The worst outcome is not the account. It is the domain. When your URL is on a sub’s filter list, other people mentioning you get removed too, and you have lost the recommendation channel you were trying to build. That is not something a new account fixes.
Which is why the order of operations is: check the rules, then decide whether to comment — not comment, then find out.
The safe pattern where promotion is banned
A no-promo sub is not a closed door, it is a different door. You can still answer the question with no link and no product name, and be the person who was helpful. If the poster asks what you use, that is an invitation and the rules generally treat it as one.
Failing that, a DM is legitimate where the subreddit forbids public promotion — as long as it opens with something useful rather than a pitch, and mentions where you saw their post. One message, no follow-up if they do not reply.
This is the specific thing ReplyHey automates: it re-reads each subreddit’s live rules before a lead reaches you and routes it — a comment draft where promotion is welcome, a DM draft and a compose link where it is not — and the unsafe draft is never rendered on the page, so it cannot be pasted by mistake at 1am.