How do Reddit users generally feel about self-promotion and marketing?

Reddit's cultural stance on self-promotion is codified in its oldest informal guidelines: it is perfectly acceptable to be a Redditor who happens to have a website or product, but it is not acceptable to be a marketer who has created a Reddit account merely to push that product. This distinction, while simple in theory, is nuanced in practice and lies at the heart of how users respond to promotional content on the platform. Reddit users have a high tolerance for authenticity and a low tolerance for performance. They can generally tell when someone is genuinely part of a community versus when someone has arrived specifically to harvest attention. The signals they pick up on include account age, posting history across other subreddits, the ratio of self-promotional to non-self-promotional posts, and the tone of how someone talks about their own work. A new account that only ever posts links to one domain, for example, triggers immediate skepticism regardless of the content quality. The platform's antipathy toward marketing runs deep enough that there is an entire subreddit, r/HailCorporate, dedicated to identifying and mocking what users perceive as stealth marketing or astroturfing. When a brand or creator gets called out there, the thread often generates significant upvotes and reinforces the broader community's distrust of promotional activity. That said, Reddit users are not monolithically anti-commercial. They respond positively to brands and creators when three conditions are met: transparency about who is behind the account, demonstrated genuine participation in the community beyond promotion, and content that delivers real value regardless of its commercial origin. Many subreddits have specific days or weekly threads where self-promotion is explicitly allowed, and participation in those threads is welcomed precisely because it is contained and expected. Understanding and respecting these structural accommodations is the difference between a brand that integrates successfully into Reddit culture and one that gets expelled.