A colleague, a client or a blog post tells you that on Reddit you should post 90 percent other people’s content and 10 percent your own, and says it as though Reddit published it. You are about to open a brand presence on the strength of that sentence. Before you repeat it in a meeting, it is worth knowing whether the number sits on a Reddit page, which page, and who is bound by it.
The ratio everyone repeats, and the question nobody answers
This post is a reading of documents. It is not a test of what works for brands, and it makes no claim about outcomes and gives no advice on how much a brand should promote itself. It only reports what specific pages say, with dates.
The method is short. Each page below was fetched with curl on 13 October 2026. Archived copies are labelled as archived, with the snapshot date in the address. Anything that could not be fetched, or that returned a page with no readable text, is left out rather than reconstructed from memory.
Two things need settling. First, does Reddit’s current wording contain a ratio? Second, where did the ratio come from?
Where the numbers first appear: two 2013 Reddit pages
Two archived Reddit pages carry a figure. Both are old, and neither is presented here as current text.
The first is the Reddit FAQ, archived on 26 January 2013. Under the question “What constitutes spam?” it opens with a hedge: “It’s a gray area, but some rules of thumb”. The first bullet reads: “It’s not strictly forbidden to submit a link to a site that you own or otherwise benefit from in some way, but you should sort of consider yourself on thin ice.” Further down the same list come two lines that matter for the ratio story: “If you spend more time submitting to reddit than reading it, you’re almost certainly a spammer.” and “If over 10% of your submissions are your own site/content, you’re almost certainly a spammer.”
The second is Reddiquette, archived on 31 December 2013. It says: “Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason).” A sentence or two later: “A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content.”
Read what these are. One is a FAQ and the other is a community etiquette page. Both are worded as guidance, with “rules of thumb” and “almost certainly”, and neither is worded as an enforceable limit. The FAQ’s 10% and Reddiquette’s 9:1 are the same arithmetic written two ways: one own submission in ten. Both count submissions. Neither counts comments, and neither counts time.
Note also the phrase “widely used”. Even in 2013, Reddiquette described the ratio as something already in circulation, not as a rule it was issuing.
Here the trail runs out. This post found no earlier Reddit document and no author for the “widely used” phrase. These two archived pages are the earliest versions that were fetched, not proof of where the ratio first appeared, and no deeper origin is guessed at here.
What the pages say now: the ratio is not in the documents that could be fetched
Reddit’s current sitewide rules sit at redditinc.com. The older address, redditinc.com/policies/content-policy, redirects there. Rule 2 on the page fetched on 13 October 2026 reads: “Abide by community rules. Participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest, and do not spam or engage in disruptive behaviors (including content manipulation) that interfere with Reddit communities.”
The fetched text showed no revision date attached to the rules themselves. The dates visible on that page belong to other policies listed alongside it. The fetched text was searched for a ratio, a percent sign, the number 90 and the word “promot”. The only hit was “promote” in the rule about hate based on identity. That is a statement about this fetch on this date, not about every Reddit page.
The page does say something useful about who enforces what. It states that each community has rules “enforced by moderators”, and that below those sit platform-wide rules “enforced by us, the admins”.
Reddiquette today could not be confirmed. The live wiki and the support.reddithelp.com page returned 403 to curl. The archive snapshot of 31 December 2023 is only the r/reddit.com stub, which says “This page is no longer updated” and points to a reddithelp.com address. The snapshot of 31 December 2020 is also a stub with the same notice and no Reddiquette body text. So no claim is made here about whether the 9:1 line is still in the current Reddiquette. The honest wording is that the ratio is not found in the current pages that could be fetched.
Reddit for Business has a help centre at business.reddithelp.com. It returns 200, but its content is rendered by script and no article text came back. Those pages were not readable by this method, so no conclusion is drawn from them.
The rule that actually binds you is written by each subreddit
The 2013 FAQ already said as much. Right after its rules of thumb: “They might also set community-specific rules that supersede the ones above. And that’s okay — that’s the whole point of letting people create their own reddit communities and define what’s on topic and what’s spam.” That is Reddit’s own statement that the ratio never ranked above a community’s rules.
Three communities were fetched from dated archive copies. They are a convenience sample, not a survey, and nothing here is a statement about Reddit as a whole.
| Community | What is restricted | Exception offered | Snapshot |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/SocialMediaMarketing | Rule titled “No Excessive Self Promotion.” (title only quoted) | Not quoted, body text not used | 17 January 2024 |
| r/smallbusiness | “No business promotion posts are allowed. Promote your business in the weekly Promote-your-business thread only.” | “You can promote your business in a relevant reply to a post or comment in other threads providing that is not the main purpose of your account and it is not done repeatedly.” | 16 February 2026 |
| r/Entrepreneur | Rule 2: “Posts and comments must NOT be made for the primary purpose of selling or promoting yourself, your company or any service.” | Rule 1 sets a bar to posting: “a minimum of 10 comment karma within our subreddit.” | 19 November 2025 |
None of the three states a ratio. They also restrict different things: promotion in general, promotion posts only, and anything whose primary purpose is promotion. A 90/10 split could pass one and break another. Under r/smallbusiness, a post that promotes a business is out whatever else the account does, while a relevant reply can be fine if the account’s main purpose lies elsewhere and it is not repeated. Under r/Entrepreneur, the test is the purpose of the post or comment, and the account also has to have earned its comment karma first.
What a ratio can and cannot stand in for
A manager is really dealing with three layers. The first is Reddit’s sitewide rule: no spam, no disruptive behaviour, authentic participation. The page quoted above says the admins enforce it. The second is a sitewide etiquette page that once offered a rule of thumb, and which carries no stated enforcer in the 2013 text quoted here. The third is each subreddit’s written rules, which the quoted page says moderators enforce.
One reading the documents support is that the 2013 FAQ’s own test was not only a number. It also asked whether you read as well as submit: “If you spend more time submitting to reddit than reading it, you’re almost certainly a spammer.” and, in a neighbouring bullet, whether you “participate in discussion, or reply to peoples questions”. That is a description of what the FAQ treated as a spammer. It is not a recommendation for brands.
What the documents do not show matters just as much. None of them measures what happens to accounts that follow a ratio or break one. Nothing fetched says a ratio helps, harms, or is tolerated.
Before you say “Reddit’s rule” in a meeting
- Open the community’s rules page and read it. The 2013 FAQ said community rules supersede the general ones, and the three sampled communities each word theirs differently.
- Note the date of any archive you rely on. Every quote in this post carries a snapshot date because wording changes, and a copy from 2013 is not current text.
- Check whether the rule restricts posts, comments or both. r/smallbusiness restricts promotion posts and allows a relevant reply. r/Entrepreneur covers posts and comments.
- Check for a named thread or exemption. r/smallbusiness points promotion to a weekly Promote-your-business thread. r/Entrepreneur sets a karma requirement before posting.
- Say “a rule of thumb Reddit published in 2013”, not “Reddit’s rule”. The 2013 pages called it guidance, and the current Rules page fetched for this post contains no ratio.
Keep reading
The same published-versus-repeated method, applied elsewhere on this blog: what Instagram has published, and what it has not; what the platforms actually document about business account restrictions; and the paid partnership label and the FTC disclosure standard.
FAQ
Does Reddit publish a 90/10 or 9:1 rule?
Archived 2013 pages did. The FAQ of 26 January 2013 said that if over 10% of your submissions are your own site or content you are almost certainly a spammer, and Reddiquette of 31 December 2013 called 9:1 “a widely used rule of thumb”. In the current Reddit Rules page fetched on 13 October 2026, no ratio was found, and the current Reddiquette text could not be confirmed.
Who decides what counts as self-promotion on a subreddit?
The 2013 FAQ said moderators might set community-specific rules that supersede its own guidance, and the current Reddit Rules page says community rules are enforced by moderators. The three sampled communities show how much those rules differ: r/SocialMediaMarketing lists “No Excessive Self Promotion.”, r/smallbusiness sends promotion to a weekly thread, and r/Entrepreneur restricts content whose primary purpose is promotion.
Sources
- Reddit FAQ, archived 26 January 2013, fetched 2026-10-13
- Reddiquette, archived 31 December 2013, fetched 2026-10-13
- Reddit Rules, fetched 2026-10-13
- r/reddit.com Reddiquette stub, archived 31 December 2023, fetched 2026-10-13
- r/reddit.com Reddiquette stub, archived 31 December 2020, fetched 2026-10-13
- r/SocialMediaMarketing rules, archived 17 January 2024, fetched 2026-10-13
- r/smallbusiness, archived 16 February 2026, fetched 2026-10-13
- r/Entrepreneur, archived 19 November 2025, fetched 2026-10-13
