Subreddit recon
Done once per target subreddit, before the first comment, and revisited when a sub's behaviour changes. Each subreddit is effectively its own platform with its own enforcement, and the cost of guessing wrong is usually permanent.
Read before writing
Twenty to thirty posts, sorted by top and by new. What to extract:
- Tolerance. How much commercial presence is visible at all? Are there operators in the comments who are obviously operators, and do they get upvoted or buried?
- Formality. Some subs run on one-liners and jokes; some expect worked detail. A long careful answer in a joke sub reads as badly out of place as a flip one-liner in a technical sub.
- Trigger words. Every sub has terms that reliably start a fight, usually a vendor, a methodology, or a phrase the community has decided is nonsense.
- What gets removed. Read the modlog where the sub publishes one. It is the clearest available statement of what the rules mean in practice, as opposed to what they say.
- Who answers. The accounts that consistently get upvoted are the model. Match their shape, not the shape of a good answer in the abstract.
Rules, then policy
Read the subreddit's own rules and any wiki or pinned posting guide first. Sitewide policy caps self-promotion at a tenth of activity; treat that as a floor rather than a target, because moderators enforce their own version regardless of what the sitewide guidance says, and their version is the one that bans accounts.
Where the two conflict, the subreddit wins. There is no appeal to sitewide policy that a moderator is obliged to honour, and subreddit bans are usually permanent.
The ratio in practice
A tenth is the ceiling on self-promotional activity, not a quota to fill. Accounts that hit exactly one in ten look engineered, because they are.
The workable version: comment where there is nothing to promote, most of the time, in subs that have nothing to do with the business as well as the target ones. Commercial mention becomes rare enough that it is unremarkable when it happens. If the ratio has to be calculated, it is already too high.
Discovery and timing
Vote velocity in the first hour decides visibility, so a comment early on a rising thread outperforms a better comment posted a day later. Being first with an adequate answer beats being fifth with the best one.
Sorting by new across a handful of target subreddits is the whole discovery method. Not search, not saved threads, not a weekly sweep — a short daily pass over new posts in a small set of subs.
That constrains how many subreddits one person can genuinely cover. Three to five worked properly beats fifteen checked occasionally, and the difference shows up in whether the account is recognized by regulars.
Spread
Never post the same content to many subreddits, and never to more than a couple in one day. Cross-posting identical material is the most reliably punished pattern on the platform, and it is trivially visible from a profile page.
Staying in the thread
Ignoring replies to your own comment reads as traffic farming, because that is what traffic farming looks like. A comment that starts a conversation and then goes silent costs more credibility than never commenting.
Budget for the follow-up before posting. If there is no capacity to come back to a thread within a day, the comment is not ready to go out.