Does Reddit delete self-promotion? I measured 4,700 comments across 12 subreddits

"Don't self-promote on Reddit, you'll get removed" is advice almost everyone gives and almost nobody measures. I wanted a number, so I pulled 4,700 comments from 12 subreddits where founders hang out, checked which ones were later removed, and compared comments where the writer talked about their own product with comments where they did not. The conclusion comes first, then how I got there.

The short answer

1. Yes, self-promotional comments were removed more often, but by less than the folklore says: 23.2% against 16.0%, or about 1.45 times. Most self-promotion survived.
2. A link went with removal more strongly than self-promotion did. Ordinary comments with a link were removed more often than self-promotional comments without one.
3. The subreddit mattered more than either. In some boards self-promotion was removed almost twice as often as ordinary talk; in others it was removed less often.
4. When a self-promotional comment vanished, a moderator, AutoModerator or Reddit removed it. Authors almost never deleted their own.

Figure 1 and Table 1 show the overall rates. The 95% intervals for self-promotional comments are wide because there were only 151 of them, but the lower end of the ratio's interval (1.07) is still above 1, so the gap is not just noise.

Put plainly: about 1 in 6 ordinary comments in these subreddits was gone later, and about 1 in 4 self-promotional ones. That is a real difference, but it is far from "self-promotion always gets removed".

One more caution before the details. Part of the gap comes from where self-promotion happens. Self-promotional comments were more common in subreddits that remove a lot of everything. When I compared self-promotional and ordinary comments within each subreddit and then combined the results, the ratio fell from 1.45 to 1.26. So a sizable part of the extra removal is about which subreddit the comment was in, not the pitch itself.

How I decided what counts as self-promotion

I could not read 4,700 comments by hand, so I used a fixed pattern decided before counting anything. A comment counted as self-promotional when it matched any of six phrases, ignoring case:

• "I" or "we" followed by built, made, created, launched, run or shipped.
• "my" followed by app, tool, product, SaaS, startup, site or project.
• "our" followed by app, tool, product, platform or service.
• "I'm the founder", "I'm the maker", "I'm the dev" or "I'm the creator".
• "full disclosure".
• "disclaimer: I".

A comment "had a link" when its text contained "http". Removed means the comment was removed by a moderator or Reddit, or deleted by its author, at any time before the archive checked it a second time.

This pattern is rough. When I read 86 matches in full, 22 were not really self-promotion, about 26%. They were idioms like "I made a mistake", quotes mocking someone else's pitch ("we built an AI tool that solves EXACTLY this"), or people describing a tool they use but did not make. It also misses quieter self-promotion that never says "my app". Keep that in mind for every number below: the self-promotional group is a noisy approximation.

There is a second gap. 931 of the 4,700 comments had already been blanked to "[removed]" or "[deleted]" when the archive first saw them, so there was no text left to classify. They are left out of both groups. Every comparison in this article uses the 3,769 comments whose text was still readable.

Does a link make the difference?

This was the result I did not expect. I split the readable comments by two things at once: whether they were self-promotional, and whether they had a link (Table 2 and Figure 2).

Ordinary comments with a link were removed 33.9% of the time, against 13.8% for ordinary comments without one: 2.46 times as often (95% interval 2.09 to 2.89). Comparing within each subreddit and combining, the ratio was 2.37, so this one is not explained by the mix of subreddits.

Among self-promotional comments, the link made less of a visible difference (27.9% against 21.3%), but with 43 and 108 comments the interval is too wide to say whether the link adds anything there. What the data does say is that a link was the clearer warning sign. Self-promotional comments carried links far more often than ordinary ones (28.5% against 11.2%), which is part of why they were removed more.

This fits with what subreddits publish. In a separate count from the same month, I classified 1,718 AutoModerator notices across 24 marketing and startup subreddits, and 313 of them (18.2%) were URL or link bans. Many removals look like filters reacting to links, not moderators reading the pitch.

Each subreddit behaves differently

The overall ratio hides boards that point in opposite directions. Table 3 lists all 12 subreddits, and Figure 3 shows the six with at least 10 self-promotional comments, sorted by how much more often self-promotion was removed.

Three groups appear. In r/SideProject and r/indiehackers, self-promotion was removed about 1.8 times as often as ordinary talk. In r/SaaSMarketing and r/buildinpublic, it made no difference. In r/SaaS and r/Entrepreneur, self-promotional comments were removed less often than ordinary ones.

The links help explain r/SaaS. Only 1 of its 15 self-promotional comments had a link, while ordinary comments with a link were removed 56.0% of the time there, the highest of any board (Figure 4). Talking about your product without a link was tolerated; links were not. Figure 4 also shows that the link gap held in every subreddit with at least 20 linked comments, from r/SideProject (17.8% against 7.3%) to r/SaaS (56.0% against 16.4%).

The sample sizes per board are small. r/SideProject's 1.86 rests on 2 removals out of 13 self-promotional comments. Read Table 3 as a direction, not as a fixed rate you can plan around.

Who removes them

Reddit's archive data separates comments removed by moderators, AutoModerator or Reddit itself from comments deleted by their own author. Table 4 shows the split.

34 of 35 self-promotional removals, 97%, came from moderators or Reddit. For ordinary comments it was 518 of 580. People did not post a pitch and then quietly take it down out of embarrassment; when self-promotion disappeared, someone else removed it.

What this means for how you write

These are correlations from one sample, so I will keep the advice to what the numbers can carry.

• Mentioning your own product is not automatically fatal. More than three quarters of self-promotional comments in this sample stayed up.
• Be most careful with links. A comment with a link was removed far more often, whether or not it was selling anything. If the answer stands on its own without the URL, leave the URL out, and let people ask or find you through your profile.
• Learn the subreddit before you post. The same comment had very different odds in r/SideProject and r/SaaS. Read the sidebar and look for pinned AutoModerator rules about links and account age.
• Do not read the overall numbers as permission. A 23.2% removal rate still means about 1 in 4 self-promotional comments disappeared, and this data says nothing about bans or how moderators treat repeat posters.

If you are deciding which threads are worth answering in the first place, the guide to finding customers on Reddit covers that side, and the GummySearch alternatives comparison lists tools that find those threads for you.

FAQ

Method

• Source: Arctic Shift, a free public archive of Reddit data, queried on 2026-08-20 for the newest 100 comments per window in 12 subreddits: r/growmybusiness, r/SaaSMarketing, r/SideProject, r/smallbusiness, r/microsaas, r/SaaS, r/indiehackers, r/Entrepreneur, r/buildinpublic, r/startups, r/webdev and r/marketing.
• Windows: the six months before the pull were split into seven 26-day windows. 56 of the 84 requests succeeded and 28 returned an error, so some boards are missing some windows. That gave 5,600 comments.
• The newest window (2026-07-25 to 2026-08-20, 900 comments) was excluded because the archive had not yet re-checked any of those comments for removal. That leaves 4,700 comments. Because each request returned the newest 100 comments in its window, they were posted between March 15 and July 25, 2026. 1,546 of them (32.9%) were gone in some form, including the 931 already blanked when first archived.
• Removed: the archive's later re-check marked the comment as removed or deleted, or the text was already "[removed]" or "[deleted]". Removals by moderators, AutoModerator and Reddit were counted separately from deletions by the author.
• Self-promotion and links: the six phrases listed above, and "http" in the text. Comparisons use only the 3,769 comments with readable text.
• Statistics: 95% intervals for rates use the Wilson method, and intervals for ratios use the usual log approximation. The within-subreddit ratios (1.26 and 2.37) are Mantel-Haenszel estimates.
• I took these measurements in August 2026 while building WarmList, the earlier version of Ownfeed, and recalculated every number in this article from the saved raw data for this write-up.

Limits

• This is correlation, not causation. Comments with links may differ in other ways, such as coming from new accounts, and I did not control for account age, karma or thread.
• The self-promotion filter is noisy: about a quarter of matches were false positives, and it misses self-promotion that avoids the six phrases. I did not correct the rates for this, because I do not know whether false positives are removed more or less often.
• Only 151 comments were classified as self-promotional, so per-subreddit numbers rest on very few removals.
• The archive only sees removals that happened before its second check, and the gap between posting and that check varied by window. Some comments may have been removed later.
• 931 comments were already blanked when first archived and could not be classified. If self-promotion is removed especially fast, the true gap could be larger than measured here.
• It covers 12 founder and marketing subreddits in one half-year. Other communities may behave very differently.
• I build Ownfeed, a tool that helps people find Reddit threads to reply to, so I have an interest in this topic. I report the results that cut against the usual advice alongside the ones that support it, and the raw-data recalculation is kept with the analysis notes.