Reddit rules index · Data report · rules read Sept 24–26, 2026
What 705 subreddits' rules say about self-promotion and AI
We read the written rules of 705 subreddits, from communities of a little over a thousand members to r/gaming (47 million), and recorded what each one says about promoting your own work and about AI-generated content. Most restrict promotion. More than a third remove some or all AI-generated content, and the bigger the community, the more likely it is.
- 53%restrict self-promotion (376 of 705)
- 12allow it with no conditions; none has over 1 million members
- 36%remove some or all AI-generated content (256)
- 65%of the 17 with over 10 million members do
1. Over half restrict self-promotion. Only 12 allow it outright.
376 of the 705 communities (53.3%) have a rule that restricts or forbids promoting your own work. 97 (13.8%) allow it only in a dedicated thread, such as a weekly self-promotion post, and 88 (12.5%) allow it with limits: a flair, a ratio like 9:1, one post a week or an account minimum. Only 12 (1.7%) allow it with no stated condition, and the largest of them, r/typography, has 471,755 members. 132 (18.7%) have no rule that mentions promotion at all; 62 of those list no rules at all.
Count by membership instead and the picture is stricter: the restricting communities hold 68.4% of the combined memberships, the outright-allowed ones 0.3%. (Memberships overlap, since one account can join many communities, so this is a share of memberships, not of people.)
2. Bigger communities are stricter about promotion
40% of communities under 100,000 members restrict self-promotion; 66% of those with 1 to 10 million do. Small communities are the most likely to say nothing about it (35% of them). Not one of the 173 communities over a million members allows promotion without conditions; 28 of them offer a dedicated thread.
| Members | Communities | Allowed | With limits | Thread only | Restricted | No rule | AI content removed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 100k | 204 | 3 (2%) | 35 (17%) | 13 (6%) | 82 (40%) | 71 (35%) | 36 (18%) |
| 100k to 1M | 328 | 9 (3%) | 36 (11%) | 56 (17%) | 180 (55%) | 47 (14%) | 125 (38%) |
| 1M to 10M | 156 | 0 (0%) | 17 (11%) | 26 (17%) | 103 (66%) | 10 (6%) | 84 (54%) |
| Over 10M | 17 | 0 (0%) | 0 (0%) | 2 (12%) | 11 (65%) | 4 (24%) | 11 (65%) |
| All | 705 | 12 (2%) | 88 (12%) | 97 (14%) | 376 (53%) | 132 (19%) | 256 (36%) |
Only 17 communities are over 10 million members, so read that row as indicative.
3. 36% remove some or all AI-generated content
256 communities (36.3%) have a rule that removes some or all AI-generated posts, comments or media. Some ban anything made with AI (r/DIY: “AI generated content of any kind is NOT permitted”); others remove only low-effort AI images or unchecked AI answers. 20 more remove bots or automated accounts, 15 allow AI content only when it is labeled, and 43 have a rule that names AI or bots in some other way. In all, 334 (47.4%) say something about AI or bots.
The share climbs with size: 18% under 100,000 members, 38% at 100,000 to a million, 54% at 1 to 10 million and 65% over 10 million. Weighted by membership, the communities with such a rule hold 62.7% of the combined memberships.
4. Things we didn't expect
- The communities about making things are the strictest on AI. By topic, 57% of the artists and designers communities and 56% of the musicians communities remove some AI content, against 14% for YouTubers and creators.
- Several marketing communities ban AI-written posts. r/marketing: “We have a zero tolerance policy to AI generated content.” 13 of the 41 marketing communities we read have such a rule, among them r/DigitalMarketing, r/digital_marketing and r/advertising.
- Even AI communities do. 11 of 35 AI-tool communities remove some AI content. r/ChatGPT (11.6M members): “AI art submissions are allowed only if they showcase something very unique or unusual.”
- Allowing promotion doesn't mean allowing AI. 5 of the 12 communities that allow promotion outright have an AI rule, including the largest, r/typography: “Low-effort AI-generated content and links to inaccurate or misleading AI-generated content are not allowed. If AI was used, say so.”
- Few ask you to label AI content. Only 15 communities allow AI content on condition that it's labeled, against 256 that remove some or all of it.
| Topic | Communities | Remove some AI content | Promotion allowed, limited or in a thread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artists and designers | 37 | 21 (57%) | 9 (24%) |
| Musicians | 52 | 29 (56%) | 18 (35%) |
| Writers and authors | 23 | 11 (48%) | 14 (61%) |
| Developer tools and open source | 68 | 29 (43%) | 15 (22%) |
| Marketers | 41 | 13 (32%) | 9 (22%) |
| AI tools | 35 | 11 (31%) | 13 (37%) |
| Games and game developers | 65 | 18 (28%) | 23 (35%) |
| Small businesses | 29 | 8 (28%) | 9 (31%) |
| SaaS and startups | 35 | 5 (14%) | 11 (31%) |
| YouTubers and creators | 42 | 6 (14%) | 14 (33%) |
Topics are our groupings by community name and description; a community can sit in more than one, and some groups are small.
5. The largest communities, by what their rules say
Allow promotion with no stated condition (all 12)
r/typography 472k · r/Frontend 351k · r/drums 325k · r/studytips 276k · r/dubstep 244k · r/iOSProgramming 206k · r/Unity2D 193k · r/Pathfinder2e 155k · r/mixingmastering 149k · r/phonk 39k · r/cardgames 25k · r/WebXR 3k
Allow it with limits (largest 10 of 88)
r/Bitcoin 8.2M · r/Fantasy 4.0M · r/Android 3.2M · r/dogs 2.9M · r/Twitch 2.9M · r/rap 2.6M · r/classicalmusic 2.5M · r/javascript 2.5M · r/worldbuilding 1.9M · r/Screenwriting 1.8M
Only in a dedicated thread (largest 10 of 97)
r/listentothis 17.9M · r/ChatGPT 11.6M · r/apple 6.5M · r/photography 5.7M · r/Steam 5.4M · r/Entrepreneur 5.3M · r/streetwear 5.1M · r/SkincareAddiction 5.0M · r/iphone 4.7M · r/solotravel 4.6M
Remove some or all AI-generated content (largest 12 of 256)
r/gaming 47.3M · r/Music 38.6M · r/DIY 27.5M · r/food 24.6M · r/LifeProTips 23.1M · r/personalfinance 21.9M · r/WritingPrompts 18.9M · r/InternetIsBeautiful 16.6M · r/pcmasterrace 16.3M · r/travel 14.5M · r/ChatGPT 11.6M · r/cats 9.5M
Each community's page quotes the rule itself and the date we read it. Browse all 705 in the rules index, or the AI and bot rules list.
Download the data
One row per community: name, members, what the rules say about self-promotion, what they say about AI, where to post when we've noted it, the date we read the rules and links to our page and to the community's own rules. Free to use with a link to threadfox.vip/rules/report. The charts are free to share with the source line intact.
Download CSV (705 rows)Full index CSV, with rule text
Method
Which communities. These 705 are not a random sample and not Reddit's top communities. They are every community we could read from a list ThreadFox drew up by hand for its own posting research: 798 names of places where people share projects, products, music, art, writing, games and hobbies, plus large general-interest communities such as r/gaming, r/food and r/personalfinance. 702 come from that list and 3 were read by name outside that list. 96 names on the list are left out: 44 we could not read, 34 that are not public (private, approved posters only or archived), 15 under 1,000 members, 2 marked adult and 1 (r/selfhosted) that we read but our index build skipped because of a text-encoding fault. The list leans toward communities where someone might want to share their own work, so the results describe those communities, not Reddit as a whole.
What we read. Each community's member count and description and its rules as Reddit publishes them (the rules page: rule titles and their text), read through a signed-in browser. 61 were read on September 24, 2026 and 644 on September 26. Sidebars, wikis, pinned posts and AutoModerator settings were not read, except that a description or posting guideline can reveal a promotion thread.
How a community gets its promotion verdict. Only rules that mention promotion count: self-promotion, advertising, plugs, affiliate or referral links, sharing your own product or channel, a 9:1 or 10% ratio, selling or marketing. A rule about “spam” or “soliciting” alone does not. If a promotion rule points to a weekly, monthly or pinned thread, the verdict is only in a dedicated thread. A rule that grants permission is allowed, or allowed, with limits when it names a condition (a ratio, a flair, a posting day, an account minimum) or sits beside a prohibition. A prohibition, or a rule that mentions promotion without permitting it, is restricted. No promotion rule: no rule mentions promotion. The readings are automatic pattern matches on the rule text; 39 communities were also reviewed by hand, and their reviewed reading wins.
How a community gets its AI reading. A rule counts as removing AI content when it names AI-generated material (posts, comments, images, music, answers) and prohibits it in the same sentence or list, including narrow rules such as “no low-effort AI art”. A rule that only names an AI product or topic counts as mentions AI or bots. 337 communities whose rules mention AI were reviewed by hand.
Limitations. Rules change, and these are readings from late September 2026. The verdicts are our reading of the written rules, not the moderators' view, and moderators enforce their own interpretation. Many communities also filter new or low-karma accounts in ways the rules page doesn't show. Member counts are as Reddit reported them on the day we read them; summed across communities they reach 952,540,245, but memberships overlap, so that is not a count of people. Size bands are fixed cut-offs and the largest band has only 17 communities.
Who we are. ThreadFox makes Reddit tools that draft posts with AI. That more than a third of these communities remove AI-generated content is a finding about the communities our own users post in, and we report it as we found it. The numbers on this page are generated from the published index by one script; the per-community pages show the rule text behind each verdict.
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