How do you promote on Reddit without getting banned?

Understand who bans you and why

Two different systems can end your Reddit presence. Subreddit moderators enforce community rules, and they remove promotion manually and fast. Reddit's own spam systems watch account-level patterns: post frequency, link ratio, account age, and karma. Getting past one doesn't protect you from the other. A post that survives moderation can still feed the pattern that gets the account shadowbanned.

The old community heuristic still holds: self-promotion should be a small fraction of your activity, with 10% the commonly cited ceiling. Accounts that answer questions for weeks and occasionally mention their product survive. Accounts created last Tuesday that post the same link in 6 subreddits don't.

The rules that actually vary

Every subreddit sets its own promotion policy, and they genuinely differ. Some ban links entirely. Some allow them in comments but not posts. Many run weekly promo threads where pitching is welcome. Reading the sidebar takes 2 minutes; learning the rules from a removal costs you the community. Karma and account-age minimums are common and usually unwritten.

What never survives

• AI-generated replies posted at scale. Communities spot the cadence, moderators ban the account, and the brand wears it.
• Buying upvotes or coordinating votes. Reddit's detection here is better than people assume.
• Undisclosed founder replies praising their own product. Getting outed becomes the thread.

This is why Grabbit deliberately doesn't automate posting or replies. It finds and scores the threads worth answering; a human writes every reply from the dashboard through their own Reddit account. Slower per reply, and the account survives to compound.

Being early with a genuinely useful answer, in a community whose rules you've read, is the whole trick. Find those threads faster.