r/SideProject Rules and Self-Promotion Policy (2026)

The best posting times for r/SideProject in our dataset are: Saturday 10AM EST (Weekend Hacker Peak), Tuesday 2PM EST (Productivity Spike), Friday 5PM EST (Show-off Hour). Posting during these windows gives your post a better chance at early votes and replies, which is what keeps a new post visible in the feed.

r/SideProject is relatively open to self-promotion, but you still need to provide genuine value. Show what you built, explain why, and engage with feedback. The key is providing genuine value first. Share insights, answer questions, and build a reputation before mentioning your product.

Read every rule in the sidebar before posting. r/SideProject has 3 community rules in our dataset. The moderation style is described as "relaxed." Keep self-promotion a small share of your total activity. Engage with comments on your posts. Never use multiple accounts to upvote yourself.

Based on community patterns, the highest-performing content formats on r/SideProject include: Roast My Landing Page, Progress Update, First Users Story. Focus on providing specific, useful value with real data and examples.

With consistent effort, many people start seeing replies and profile visits from r/SideProject within a few weeks. The key is following the posting playbook: start by listening, then contribute value through comments, then share your own content once you have established credibility.

The 10% figure comes from Reddit's older self-promotion guidance: roughly 1 in 10 of your posts or comments linking to your own product. Reddit's current spam guidance does not set a percentage; it asks people whose contributions are mostly links to their own business to be thoughtful about frequency. On r/SideProject, moderators are more lenient because the subreddit is built for show-and-tell, but an account that only posts its own links still looks like spam. The practical version: make most of your activity useful contributions that do not mention your brand.

Reddit's site-wide policy does not explicitly ban AI-generated content, but r/SideProject moderators have filters that catch low-effort AI text. The pattern that gets banned is not 'AI assistance' but obvious copy-paste outputs: filler phrases like 'in today's fast-paced world', dash-heavy prose, fake stats, or AEO-style content stuffed with keywords. Posts that use AI as a draft tool but include real specifics (your data, your screenshots, your own experience) generally pass. Posts that read as 100% generated and link to a product page do not.

A removed post on r/SideProject usually means you tripped one of the 3 community rules, not that you did anything malicious. Check the removal reason if Reddit shows one, reread the specific rule you likely broke, and resist the urge to immediately repost the same content. That pattern reads as spam to a "relaxed" mod team and can escalate a simple removal into a ban. If the removal genuinely seems wrong, a short, polite modmail message asking for clarification is the right next step, not arguing in the thread itself.

Not word for word, and not on the same day. r/SideProject overlaps in membership with communities like r/IndieHackers, r/SaaS, r/AlphaAndBetaUsers, so an identical crosspost reads as spam to anyone subscribed to both and can get flagged as duplicate content. Instead, rewrite the framing for each subreddit's specific audience and space the posts out by at least a few days. The underlying idea can stay the same, but the title, the angle, and what you choose to emphasize should change.

Most subreddits run AutoMod rules that hold posts from new or low-karma accounts, and Reddit lets moderators filter by Contributor Quality Score, a hidden account rating that users cannot see. If your post never appeared, the likely cause is an account-level filter rather than the content. Build comment history first, and use modmail to ask the r/SideProject moderators politely if you are unsure.