What are the most common rule-breaking behaviors new users accidentally commit?

New users break Reddit's rules primarily through ignorance rather than malice, and several patterns recur often enough to be worth knowing in advance. Understanding these common mistakes can prevent early account actions and wasted effort. The most frequent accidental violation is self-promotion without context. Reddit's rules allow users to share links to their own content, but the widely-followed norm is that no more than about one in ten submissions should be your own work. New users who create accounts primarily to share their YouTube channel, blog, or business frequently submit a stream of purely self-promotional posts across multiple subreddits, which moderators recognize as spam behavior regardless of the content's actual quality. The result is removal and bans in those communities even if the user had no awareness they were spamming. Vote solicitation is another common accidental violation. Posting "upvote if you agree" or "this deserves more attention" in a comment or post body is explicitly prohibited under both Reddiquette and Reddit's vote manipulation rules. Many new users import habits from other platforms — Instagram encourages "double-tap if you like this," and Twitter culture includes "RT this" calls — and apply them on Reddit without realizing they violate policy here. Reposting without verification is also common. Sharing content that has been thoroughly debunked, or reposting an image without checking whether it was recently posted in the same subreddit, leads to removal and sometimes hostile community responses. Large subreddits have automod rules that automatically remove duplicate posts, but smaller communities rely on manual enforcement. Finally, treating Reddit like a search engine or AI assistant — posting a question in a subreddit without reading its rules or culture first — often results in removals. Many communities have strict requirements about what types of questions are appropriate, how they should be formatted, and what prior research is expected before posting.