Posting rules, Reddit and community
A comment passes three readers before anything can quote it.
The community's published rules, the moderator who reads it next, and the person it was actually written for. Each of them removes contributions for a different reason, and what survives all three is the only kind an answer engine ever gets to quote. Everything on this page is runnable without us.
Three of the four fall short of the same line, and they fall short of it for the same reason rather than for three different ones.
54%
of Reddit admin removals were spam
54.4 million posts and comments, July to December 2025.
82 hosts
carried the citations we counted between them
901 citations across 60 answers. Our own measurement.
7 of 12
queries flipped outcome across identical repeats
One model, five repeats each. A single read is a coin flip.
The short version
One definition, in a paragraph a model can quote.
Definition first, under sixty words, no pronoun pointing at anything outside itself. It is the same shape we build for clients, on our own page, which is the only honest way to sell it.
Short answer
What are the rules for posting about your own product on Reddit?
Posting rules for a company on Reddit and Hacker News are the published community rules, the moderator norms of each individual subreddit, and the reader standard a contribution has to clear before anyone quotes it. Citon runs every contribution through all three, from dedicated accounts with standing in that specific community, never from a founder account.
Posting rules for a company on Reddit and Hacker News are the published community rules, the moderator norms of each individual subreddit, and the reader standard a contribution has to clear before anyone quotes it. Citon runs every contribution through all three, from dedicated accounts with standing in that specific community, never from a founder account.
Posting rules for a company on Reddit and Hacker News are the published community rules, the moderator norms of each individual subreddit, and the reader standard a contribution has to clear before anyone quotes it.1
Same words, both times. A paragraph that has to be summarised before it can be used is a paragraph an assistant paraphrases and does not cite.
The four rungs
Four rungs, and one of them answers the question you are asking.
In the order a contribution meets them, which is also the order they remove things. Three of the four decide whether it exists at all, and the fourth decides whether writing it was worth anybody's afternoon.
One column is full and the other has a single mark in it. That ratio is the argument, and it does not change with how much anybody spends.
The rules the community publishes
Still gets removed
- read before you type
- no link in a first comment
- one thread, not five
- What it decides
- What comes out on a rule somebody wrote in advance. Communities publish their own, and most of them say the same thing in different words: contribute before you promote, say who you work for, and do not post one message in five places.
- Who holds it today
- Anybody willing to read for ten minutes, which makes this the cheapest rung on the ladder and the one most outsourced work skips. Reading rules does not scale and posting does.
The person who reads it next
Still gets removed
- opens your account history
- reads the last twenty posts
- acts on the pattern
- What it decides
- Whether the account looks like somebody who works in the field or somebody who arrived to say one thing. Reddit admins removed 54.4 million posts and comments in the second half of 2025 and 54 percent of admin removals were spam, so the default posture toward a new account naming a product is not a neutral one.
- Who holds it today
- Accounts with standing in that specific community. Standing does not transfer between communities, which is why one high-karma account is not an asset across ten of them and why the accounts are run as infrastructure.
The person it was written for
Still gets removed
- answer in the first line
- context after, not before
- one product named, at most
- What it decides
- Whether the opening sentence answers the question that was asked. A contribution that spends three paragraphs arriving at its point is read by nobody and quoted by nothing, however true the point turns out to be.
- Who holds it today
- Whoever wrote the most useful thing in the thread, which is usually not a vendor. This is the rung where a better product loses to somebody with an afternoon and a direct answer.
The answer assembled weeks later
Where it pays
- thread cited in an answer
- one fragment lifted whole
- nobody watching it happen
- What it decides
- Which fragment gets lifted when a buyer asks an assistant the category question weeks afterwards. Across 901 citations we counted, 91.5 percent pointed off-site over 82 distinct hosts, so the thread is where the answer is built rather than where it is read.
- Who holds it today
- Usually nobody in particular, and that is the opening. A comment that answers in its first sentence is the fragment an assistant can lift whole, which is the same craft as an answer capsule and a different craft from writing to be upvoted.
The first three rungs decide whether the contribution exists. The fourth decides whether it was worth writing. Work that stops at the third produces a well-received comment that nothing is quoting.
One case, all the way through
The verdict falls out of the trace, not out of an opinion.
One contribution, taken end to end. The same hundred and eighty words, read by three people who each remove things for different reasons, and then by nothing at all for six weeks.
one comment in a thread you did not start
- The draftA hundred and eighty words answering the question in the thread title, with the product named once, in the fourth sentence, as one of three options.
- The rulesThe community publishes a self-promotion rule. The draft says who wrote it in its first line and carries no link, so there is nothing for an automatic rule to act on.
- The moderatorThe account has eleven months of contributions in this community and almost none of them mention our product. The history reads like a practitioner, because it is one.
- The readerThe answer is the first sentence. The context that would have opened it moved to the end, where somebody who wants it can find it and nobody else has to read it.
- The modelSix weeks later the thread is one of the pages an answer to the category question is assembled from, and the fragment quoted is the opening sentence.
Quotable because it was useful first, in that order
The verdict is read off the column of marks. Nothing in the trace needs an opinion about the vendor to reach it.
- The draft
- Answers the thread's question before it names anything
- The account
- Standing in this community, earned before it was needed
- The link
- Absent. A first contribution carrying one reads as an ad
- The payoff
- Weeks later, in an answer nobody watched being written
Run it yourself
Five minutes settles whether any of this is worth paying for.
Four checks, run before anybody on your team posts anything. They take a few minutes each and they remove most of the reasons a contribution disappears without a word.
- 01
Read the rules
Open the community's own rules and read all of them, not the first two. Ten minutes, and it removes the most common reason a contribution vanishes on a rule that was published in advance.
- 02
Read your own history
Open the account you are about to post from and read its last twenty contributions the way a moderator would. If every one of them is about your product, it is not an account, it is a billboard.
- 03
Answer in the first line
Write the comment, then delete the paragraph in front of it. If the thread's question is not resolved by the end of the opening sentence, nothing downstream is going to quote it.
- 04
Post it and stay in the thread
No link, no follow-up pitch, and answer the replies as somebody who works in the field. A contribution that has to be defended was an advertisement, and everybody reading could tell.
All four already true
Your own team is already contributing this way, from accounts with standing. There is nothing here for us to sell you, and the money is better spent on more of their time.
Two or three
The craft is there and the account infrastructure is not, or the reverse. This is the position the program is built for, because the missing half is the half that is buyable.
None
Nothing your company posts is surviving the first reader, so nothing downstream can quote any of it. The first job is standing rather than volume, and standing takes months rather than a sprint.
A perfectly on-vertical category definer is a bad engagement for both sides. A slightly off-vertical challenger is a good one.
Four questions, asked in one sitting, answerable by anybody being paid to do this work. An answer that needs a follow-up meeting is an answer.
A perfectly on-vertical category definer is a bad engagement for both sides. A slightly off-vertical challenger is a good one.
The method, given away
How to run it without hiring anyone.
The craft is not proprietary either. This is the sequence a contribution goes through here, written out so your own team can run it on the threads your answers already cite.
- 01Take the thread from the answer
- 02Read the community firstFixed first
- 03Use an account with a history
- 04Answer first, name second
- 05Stay in the thread for a week
Four of the five can be reordered without much cost. The one marked cannot be moved at all once anything else has started.
- 01
Take the thread from the answer
Run your category question against a live answer and read which pages it was assembled from. Work inside that set. A keyword tool reports what people type into a search box, which is a different and much longer list.
- 02
Read the community first
The rules first, then a week of what reached the front page. You are looking for what gets removed and what gets upvoted, and both are visible inside ten minutes without posting anything.
- 03
Use an account with a history
Contribute from an account with standing in that specific community, aged and maintained, and never from the founder account. Standing is earned per community and does not travel with the person.
- 04
Answer first, name second
Open with the answer, name your product once if it genuinely fits, and put the caveats after. A comment that answers first is the fragment an assistant can lift whole, which is the whole point of being there.
- 05
Stay in the thread for a week
Reply to the replies, and post a correction the same day it is needed. A correction arriving a week late has already been read into the next answer, and there is no way to take that back.
What counts
Most of what gets offered here does not survive the first question.
Most of what gets posted on a company's behalf is removed, ignored, or both, and the reasons are not mysterious. The cuts are what leave a contribution somebody would quote.
everything anybody offers you
The counts are the two columns below this, not an estimate of what a typical intake survives. Nothing here claims a rate we have not measured.
Keep it if
- A comment that resolves the thread's question inside its first sentence.
- A disclosure of who you work for, written in the contribution rather than left in a profile.
- An account with contributions in that community that predate the campaign by months.
- A correction posted the same day, in the thread, from the account that got it wrong.
Cut it if
- A link in a first contribution. It is the fastest removal available in any community.
- The same comment in five communities. It reads as automation because that is what it is.
- A reply that argues with a criticism rather than answering the part of it that is true.
- Anything from the founder account, which risks the one reputation that cannot be rebuilt.
What it is measured against
The number is a difference between two differences.
A contribution that lands is not a position that holds. What the thread list becomes is a baseline, split and written down, so that ninety days later somebody can say how much of the movement the work caused.
- Validated
- 5 identical repeats before one query counts
- Split
- A treated arm and a held-out control arm
- Registered
- Both written down before any work starts
- Depth
- 40 queries by 40 samples, 9.9pp floor
- Readout
- Difference-in-differences at day 90
A single rising line cannot draw this, because the quantity it is missing is the one the untouched arm was holding.
Cited sets churn, so a level reading taken twice tells you almost nothing. Ahrefs measured across 43,000 keywords that AI Overviews persist 2.15 days and 45.5 percent of citations change between consecutive observations, while the answer stays 95 percent semantically identical. Ninety days is the shortest window in which the difference between two arms can be read, which is why every tier carries a 90-day minimum.
Start here, free
We run it on your queries: 12 queries, 5 repeats each, 3 engines.
Delivered in five working days, and walked through live rather than emailed as a PDF. You get your questions built and disambiguated, your failure mode named, the hosts cited on those questions ranked by citation depth, and a pre-registered baseline you can hold anyone to afterwards, including us.
The rest of the cluster
One method, two surfaces, one number at the end of both.
One instrument, pointed at two surfaces. The guide you are reading is the free half of whichever one your category actually turns on.
Questions
The five we get asked about this.
Not covered here? The Gap Report costs nothing and answers most of the rest with your own data.
Will posting about our own product get the account banned?
Not if the contribution is useful first and the affiliation is disclosed in it. Reddit admins removed 54.4 million posts and comments in the second half of 2025 and 54 percent of admin removals were spam, so the volume a moderator is filtering is enormous and the posture toward a new account naming a product is not neutral. Standing in that specific community is what changes it, and standing is earned rather than bought.
Can we post from the founder account?
You can, and it puts the one reputation you cannot rebuild behind a comment that might be removed on a rule nobody read. Contributions run from dedicated accounts with standing in the community they are posted in. The founder account stays out of it, and nothing in the program depends on it.
How many communities should we be working?
As many as your own answers actually cite, which is usually far fewer than a keyword tool returns. Across 901 citations we counted, 91.5 percent pointed off-site over 82 distinct hosts, so the set worth working is a specific short list rather than every community with your keyword in the sidebar.
Does a contribution stay useful once it is posted?
Not on its own. Ahrefs measured 45.5 percent of citations changing between consecutive observations while the answer stayed 95 percent semantically identical, so holding a position is the work rather than taking one. Threads are watched daily here and a correction goes in the same day, because one arriving a week late has already been read into the next answer.
What is in the free Gap Report?
Twelve money queries, five repeats each, across three engines, delivered in five working days. It names which of the nine failure modes you are in, ranks the hosts cited on your queries by citation depth, and sets a pre-registered baseline. It is walked through on a call rather than emailed as a PDF.
Free gap report
When the model answers,
be the one it names
Tell us your category and the questions your buyers ask. We run them against live AI answers and walk you through what came back. If you are already winning, we will tell you that too.
12 queries · 5 repeats each · 3 engines · 5 working days
Free · Walked through live · Five working days
Queries we run
Cited instead of you
reddit.com38%
g2.com26%
news.ycombinator.com21%91.5% of citations point off-site