I don't actually promote my product on Reddit, I just promote useful content I've created. My posts pretty consistently reach #1 on /r/django because (I suspect) I put substantially more time and effort into them than the average Django guide. I also try quite hard to be a good citizen and give back in a non-promotional way.
Edit: I didn't know about those numbers/terms you added. Will take a look and update my behavior accordingly if necessary.
My offense? An instructional blog about how to scrape commonly requested data by many members of the sub.
Those rules are so juvenile. Why shouldn't a website have an official reddit account from which they post? Especially when the circumvention is so trivial?
Because it would remove ad revenue from Reddit if any company could just post ads without paying.
But comment promotion is unlimited, and for that reason, that's where my mind went.
For example, some of my highest volume referrals from Reddit were comment-replies I left on some submission that became the main result for, say, "best <product> 2020". People trust comments and they have weirdly-good authority in the SERPs.
Right now if you google "battery life of <product>", it parses a comment I made on Reddit in 2018 and shows in the instant-answer box.
I know I'm getting off the thread's rails. Just thought it was somewhat interesting.
I'm surprised to hear that's a rule considering the scale of 'every single post is someone's youtube channel or news site' I see from users on reddit lately. I assumed they gave up on that rule.
It's strange, I'm seeing a lot of very low tech spam on reddit now. They (the spammer) are not even trying to hide it and reddit doesn't seem to care.
Like it's not hard to script out "check if user submitted a bazillion posts to the same youtube channel" and flag ... at least a good chunk of those.
Reddit doesn't even seem to bother now.
I'm even seeing wholesale just offensive image spam go on for ages like the old days of internet forums, reddit doesn't seem to bother with them...
If the account is new enough and links are spammed within a short amount of time, they are getting auto banned/flagged.
Accounts that are a bit older can get away with it. Sometimes those posts get removed automatically, but that's pretty unlikely. At our sub, we do flag every post that contains a link automatically. In 80% of the cases, this is spam and we delete it.
We have had spammers that kept coming back with new accounts. We have reported it numerous times to Reddit, but we highly doubt that any action has been taken. Especially accounts that try to promote youtube videos are hard to block.
It's generally up to the mods to take action. I do not believe that the 10% rule is enforced in any way.
Bans actually seemed to be really consistent from those reports.
That got shutdown and now the FAQ says use their typical contact admin / black hole that doesn't do that thing...
I'm thinking more large scale across subreddits (including a lot of subs that have nothing to do with the content). Most of these accounts have almost zero recent comments and etc.
Reddit subs are notorious for very quickly developing severe allergic reaction to anything of a self-promotion nature. A reaction that will go far beyond Reddit's standard 10% cap on self-promo posts [1] (which you are already in violation of [2]) and all the way to a permanent domain-based ban.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion
[2] https://www.reddit.com/user/czue13/submitted/