Every Reddit Marketer Quotes Reddiquette, Few Have Read the Page

What is reddiquette?

The etiquette code called reddiquette is Reddit's informal statement of community values, written by redditors and not by Reddit's policy team, and Reddit publishes it as a Help Center article under Getting Started. Its opening line, checked on September 8 2026, reads: "Reddiquette is an informal expression of the values of many redditors, as written by redditors themselves. Please abide by it the best you can." That closing request is the character of the whole document. It asks. It does not threaten.

The line every marketing post quotes is not in it. "It's perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not okay to be a website with a reddit account" comes from Reddit's separate self-promotion wiki page, published there with a joke attribution to Confucius. That page calls its own guidance "based on both reddiquette and reddit's rules," so the quote lives next door to reddiquette. Attribute it to the self-promotion page and you are already more careful than most articles that cite it.

Where does the reddiquette page live now?

Reddit moved reddiquette from its original wiki to the Reddit Help Center, and the old wiki URL is a stub. A capture of reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette taken by the Internet Archive on July 2 2024 shows the whole page replaced by two lines: "This page is no longer updated. For more up to date information go here," followed by a link to the Help Center version. That capture records the last wiki revision as four years earlier. The r/reddit.com wiki page is still publicly readable without an account, but only as that stub, so the original reddiquette text is no longer served at its old address.

The Help Center version is a rewrite. One line asks you not to "send out IMs, X posts, or any other message asking people to vote for your submission," which is the old tweet-era sentence with the platform name swapped. Cite that article, not the wiki.

Where Reddiquette Moved

Original wiki page on r/reddit.com

Stub page, archived July 2 2024

Reddit Help Center article

Who enforces reddiquette?

Nobody enforces reddiquette directly, and that is the most misread fact about it. Reddit stacks three layers of governance, and each carries a different penalty.

Layer	Written by	Enforced by	Cost of breaking it
Reddit Rules and content policy	Reddit, Inc.	Admins and sitewide filters	Account suspension, domain ban, ban evasion detection
Subreddit rules	Each moderator team	Moderators and AutoModerator	Post removal, subreddit ban, no notification
Reddiquette	Redditors	Other redditors	Downvotes, lost credibility, no formal penalty

Break reddiquette once and nothing happens to your account. Break it steadily and the community stops reading you, which costs a marketer more than one removal. Moderators also lift reddiquette's language when they write sidebar rules, so a soft norm in one community is a removable violation in the next, and many subreddits add a karma floor reddiquette never mentions. Read the sidebar before you post.

What is the reddiquette self-promotion ratio?

Reddiquette sets the ratio at one in ten submissions, and it counts submissions only: "A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content." The self-promotion wiki page words it differently, as "10% or less of your posting and conversation," which pulls comments into the denominator.

Self-promotion share = (your own links / your total submissions) x 100

Post 40 links in a month with 4 pointing at your own site and your share is 4 / 40 x 100, or 10 percent. That sits on the reddiquette ceiling, not under it. Count the way the self-promotion page counts, with 40 posts plus 200 comments in the denominator, and the same 4 links come to 1.7 percent. Which number you report depends on which page you quote, which is how two marketers both claim to follow the Reddit self-promotion rule and behave nothing alike.

Two things get misstated. It is a rule of thumb in an informal document, not a Reddit rule, and no sitewide system computes your ratio. And it has no connection to the 90-9-1 rule of community participation, which counts how many members lurk versus post.

What does reddiquette say about downvotes?

Reddiquette treats the downvote as a signal about contribution, not about agreement. It asks redditors not to "downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it," not to mass downvote one user's history, and not to "moderate a story based on your opinion of its source."

For a brand account the stakes are narrower. A downvoted comment gets collapsed, and a collapsed comment is invisible to the humans and to the AI retrievers reading the top of the thread, which makes downvote etiquette a distribution problem before it is a manners problem. Organizing downvotes against a competitor crosses out of etiquette into brigading, which the content policy covers and admins act on.

Which reddiquette rules still hold in practice?

These are the lines that survive contact with modern moderation, and what each one costs.

Rule	Why it exists	What breaking it costs
Read the community rules before submitting	Every mod team writes its own and they conflict	Removal, then a subreddit ban if you repeat it
Keep self-links near one in ten submissions	An account posting only its own domain reads as a feed	Spam removal, account ban
Never ask for votes, on Reddit or off it	Votes are the ranking signal, so solicited votes corrupt it	Reddiquette says this "will result in a ban from the admins"
Do not flood the new queue	The queue is shared and a burst buries everyone else	Reddiquette: "Shadow banning (you can see your posts and votes, but no one else can) can, and will, take place in more severe cases"
Identify yourself when you have a stake	Undisclosed affiliation reads as deception once found	Removal, plus a callout thread that outranks your own page
Do not run sockpuppets	One person voting as five is vote manipulation	Account bans and, in Reddit's words, a banned domain
Link the original source, not your repost	Traffic should reach the creator	Removal as linkjacking

Take the shadowban clause literally. Reddiquette names the mechanism, describes the symptom, and says it applies to severe cases, which is where a marketer lands after a week of link posts. Check whether you are filtered before you write anything else, because a Reddit shadowban hides everything you posted since it started.

What gets a marketer removed from Reddit?

Reddit's self-promotion page lists the specific triggers, and every one is a behavior instead of a content judgment. Submitting mostly your own links. Having employees or fans upvote your domain. Asking for votes anywhere, including on your own blog or X account. Paying someone to post for you. Hiding your affiliation or lying about why you like something. Running a subreddit that carries only your own links, which the page calls linkfarming. Spamming through private messages.

The page is blunt about how Reddit judges this: "We're not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit." Your post being good is not a defense. Reddit's moderator tooling backs that up with a ban evasion filter, a reputation filter, and a Contributor Quality Score, so a fresh account does not reset the problem.

How do you follow reddiquette at scale?

Following reddiquette at scale is a monitoring problem before it is a writing problem. The ratio takes care of itself when the thread comes to you, because you are answering someone who asked, in a community you already read, and the link is the answer. Teams break reddiquette when they go hunting for placements instead.

RedReplier tracks your keywords across Reddit, X, Bluesky, Facebook and Hacker News, ranks what it finds by buying intent, and explains with AI why each mention was flagged, so a Reddit marketing tool points you at threads where a reply is welcome. Email alerts arrive on your plan's interval, which keeps you in a thread while it is still moving.

Frequently asked questions

Is reddiquette an official Reddit rule?

No. Reddiquette is an informal document written by redditors, and Reddit's own version says so in its first sentence. The enforceable rules are the content policy and the Reddit Rules, which admins act on. Breaking reddiquette carries no automatic penalty, though moderators copy its expectations into subreddit rules that carry one.

Where does "a redditor with a website" come from?

It comes from Reddit's self-promotion wiki page, not from reddiquette. The full line is "It's perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not okay to be a website with a reddit account," published with a joke attribution to Confucius. That page has also been retired, so cite it as an archived Reddit wiki page.

What is the 9:1 rule on Reddit?

The 9:1 rule is reddiquette's rule of thumb that no more than 1 in every 10 of your submissions should link to your own content. Reddit's self-promotion page states it as 10 percent or less of your posting and conversation, counting comments too. Neither version is enforced by any sitewide system, and subreddits set stricter numbers in their own rules.

Does reddiquette ban self-promotion?

No. Reddiquette says "Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason)" and gives the 9:1 ratio as the limit. The warning attached is that if self-links are all you post, or they are always voted down, "you just might be a spammer." The document draws its line at the shape of your account, not at any single link.

Can you get banned for breaking reddiquette?

Not for reddiquette itself, but several of its lines describe conduct Reddit does ban. Asking people to vote for your submission, per reddiquette, "will result in a ban from the admins," and flooding Reddit with posts in a short span invites a shadowban. Those penalties come from the content policy and the spam systems, which reddiquette describes and does not create.

Is downvoting someone you disagree with against reddiquette?

Yes. Reddiquette asks redditors not to downvote an otherwise acceptable post because they do not personally like it, and to vote on whether a comment contributes to the discussion. It also asks you not to vote based on who posted something. Nothing stops you, which is why the norm holds unevenly across communities.

What is a Contributor Quality Score on Reddit?

It's one of three account-level checks in Reddit's moderator tooling, alongside a ban evasion filter and a reputation filter. Reddit's self-promotion page frames these checks as measuring behavior, not the quality of what you post. Opening a new account doesn't reset the score, so a pattern-heavy posting history stays attached to the account.

What is linkfarming on Reddit?

Linkfarming is Reddit's term for a subreddit that carries only one account's own links, one of the specific behaviors flagged on Reddit's self-promotion page. It sits alongside submitting mostly your own links and paying someone to post for you as one of the triggers Reddit checks for. The page treats it as a behavior problem, not a content problem, so a well-made link doesn't excuse it.

Does a downvoted comment still get seen by AI tools reading Reddit threads?

A downvoted comment collapses, which hides it from both the humans scrolling the thread and the AI retrievers reading the top of it. That turns downvote etiquette into a distribution problem for a brand account before it becomes a manners problem.

What happens if an account only posts its own links on Reddit?

Reddit's rules table calls that a spam pattern: an account posting only its own domain reads as a feed rather than a participant, which brings spam removal and eventually an account ban. Reddit's self-promotion page separately flags submitting mostly your own links as one of the behaviors it checks for. Neither penalty needs a moderator to notice by hand, the filters catch the pattern.