“Most of the brand accounts I ban, I’m sad about banning. They were just doing it wrong.”
We talked to moderators of fifteen subreddits in late 2025 about how brands behave in their communities. The subreddits ranged from 50,000 to 2 million subscribers, across consumer software, hardware, finance, and lifestyle.
The mods all said variations of the same five things. Here they are, paraphrased and consolidated.
1. Read the rules. All of them. Once.
Every subreddit has rules. They are in the sidebar, and increasingly in a stickied “for brands” post on larger subreddits. Almost no brand account has read them.
The mods are not asking for a 90-minute audit. They are asking that whoever runs your brand account read the rules of the subreddits you participate in, once, before the first post. Most rules can be read in 5 minutes per subreddit.
The most common rule violations brands trip:
- “No self-promotion” rules that ban any link to the brand’s own site
- Karma minimums (your brand-new account can’t post yet)
- Account-age minimums (your brand-new account can’t post for 30 days)
- “Comment-to-post ratio” rules that require you to participate before posting
- Specific time-of-day or day-of-week restrictions on certain post types
Mods don’t enforce these as gotchas. They enforce them because their community asked them to. When you violate them as a brand, you look like every spam account that ever rolled through.
2. Don’t post under “10:1” if you can’t sustain it.
The “10:1 rule” is a Reddit informal convention: for every promotional post you make, you should make ten other posts or comments that are not promotional, contributing to the community.
Many subreddits have made this rule explicit. Many more enforce it implicitly: the mods read your comment history before approving a post, and if it’s all “check out my product,” they ban you.
The brand-side mistake is to post once promotionally, get a polite warning, then never come back. The mods then conclude your engagement was performative. Your next promotional post is auto-removed.
The 10:1 path is to make your brand account a real participant. Reply on threads where you have something useful to say, not promoting yourself. Answer questions in your area of expertise. After a quarter of this, you’ve earned the right to occasionally post about your own thing. After a year, the mods know you and treat you like a friend of the community.
This is slow. It is the only thing that works.
3. Modmail before you post anything ambitious.
Anything bigger than a normal comment, send modmail first. AMA proposals, product announcements, partnership ideas, contests, anything that asks the community to do something. Mods almost universally prefer being asked.
The conversation looks like:
“Hi mods of r/example, we’re [brand]. We’re considering doing an AMA next month with our founder, around the topic of [thing]. Would this be welcome? Happy to follow whatever format you prefer, including verification, post timing, and Q&A duration. If now’s a bad time, that’s fine, we can wait.”
This single message, sent before any public post, gets you 80% of the goodwill in the relationship. Brands that skip this and just post the AMA cold get the AMA removed, sometimes with a temporary ban.
4. When you mess up, apologize specifically and don’t do it again.
Every brand will eventually mess up on a subreddit. The post will get removed, or there will be a complaint thread, or the brand will accidentally violate a rule.
The recovery move that mods respect: a specific, public acknowledgment of what went wrong, followed by an explicit commitment to not do it again. Not a generic “we’re sorry for any confusion.” A specific “we missed the rule about no affiliate links, won’t happen again, sorry.”
The recovery move that mods don’t respect: silent ignoring, then trying the same behavior on a different subreddit. Mods talk to each other. Some communities have shared blacklists. The brand that gets banned from one subreddit for a behavior often discovers, weeks later, they’re banned from three.
5. Don’t ask the mods to delete other users’ posts.
This one comes up all the time and the answer is always no.
Mods will not remove a thread that’s critical of your brand just because you asked. Even if the thread is wrong, even if it has factual errors, even if it’s costing you money. Mods see this ask and they recoil. The community trusts them precisely because they don’t bend to brand pressure.
What you can do: reply to the thread. Add your perspective. Correct factual errors politely. Engage like a peer. The thread might still hurt you in the short term, but the long-term version of the brand that engages thoughtfully looks much better than the one that tried to suppress.
The exception: if a thread contains factually false statements that are defamatory, mods will sometimes act on a private modmail explaining the falsehood with evidence. “Defamatory” is a high bar, and “this is critical of us” is not it. Use this option rarely, and back it up with documentation.
What to do with this list
Print the five rules. Put them next to whoever runs your brand account on Reddit.
Better: build them into the onboarding doc for whoever takes Reddit duty. The five-bullet version is enough. The ten-bullet expanded version with examples (which most teams build the second time around) is better.
The mods are not your enemy. They want brands in their subreddits, when those brands are good. They are tired of bad ones. The way to be good is unsexy: read the rules, contribute first, ask before doing big things, apologize specifically when you mess up, and don’t try to silence critics. That is the entire model.
Most brands don’t do these things. The ones that do, win the long game on Reddit by an enormous margin.
Subportly puts modmail in the same inbox as DMs, mentions, and comments, so the modmail conversation that earns mod goodwill never goes unread. See how it works.