Reddit: How Do You Break Into Big Subs Without Getting Instabanned?

[algospider]

Hi,
so I’m building a platform for a niche audio community (won’t say the niche here, but it’s one of those communities that lives almost entirely on Reddit).
Naturally, the biggest subs in this space get a ton of traffic… and of course that’s where I’d love to promote what I’m building.
The problem? I get banned instantly for anything that remotely looks like marketing.

Posts, comments, even “hey check this out” gets auto-removed. Mods are super strict, which I get, because these subs are all creator-focused and they want to keep things clean... it makes growth nearly impossible.

So what I ended up doing:

1. I started my own subreddit as a kind of neutral space.
2. Every day I post some “Daily Highlights” (basically a disguised version of creator rankings, but I keep it anonymous enough not to look like promo).
3. Then I DM the creators who show up in those highlights just to let them know. Not pitching, just “hey, you popped up today, nice work.” That surprisingly opens a lot of conversations.

But here’s where I am having trouble:
All the real traffic sits in the big subs — and I have no clue how to get visibility there without tripping the self-promo alarms.

Has anyone here actually figured this out? I feel like everyone says “Reddit is gold for niche communities,” but nobody talks about how tough it is if you’re building something for those communities and the subs don’t allow any kind of external links.

Curious if anyone found a way to crack this without burning accounts.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Sometimes, thems the breaks. Just because it exists doesn't mean it's exploitable. Take this forum for example. No spam or self-promo, ever, unless through official channels.

With that in mind, have you checked what it would cost to advertise your platform directly in these subreddits? And maybe its even cheaper if you promote your subreddit itself.

It sounds like they may be watching a feed of comments and threads, otherwise you could go into old threads that haven't been auto-closed for new comments, and drop comments in those. I enter Reddit through old threads all the time through Google, and I often search through old threads on Reddit itself. You could plant seeds this way, especially by using Google to first see which threads are ranking there.