Posting in public without being a spammer
The difference between building an audience and burning one — how to share progress that earns attention instead of triggering the mute button.
You have committed to one channel. If that channel is posting in public, the next thing that happens is that you open a forum where people are already talking about something adjacent to your project, and you have to decide what to type. Get this wrong in the obvious way and the post gets removed. Get it wrong in the less obvious way and nothing visible happens at all — the post is quietly ranked into nowhere, the account picks up a flag, and you conclude the channel does not work.
The advice you will be handed is a ratio. It is the wrong shape of answer, and in the most-quoted case it is not even the rule anymore.
The rule everyone quotes, and where it actually lives now
Almost every guide to posting about your own work cites Reddit’s 9:1 rule: nine ordinary posts for every one about your project. Treat that as folklore, because three things are true about it.
First, Reddit never phrased it as a ratio. The old self-promotion wiki stated it as a hedged percentage — ten percent or less of your posting linking to your own content. Second, that page retired itself. Its own body carries the line “This page is no longer updated.” and points readers at Reddit’s help site instead. Third, and most importantly: Reddit’s current sitewide spam policy contains no ratio at all. The live Spam article (Reddit Help Center, updated 2026-05-19) defines spam behaviorally — “repeated or unsolicited actions … that negatively affect redditors” — and nowhere converts that into a number.
Ten percent does still exist on Reddit’s own site, in exactly one place, and the framing there is the opposite of a sitewide rule. It is in the article Reddit writes for moderators about keeping spam out of their communities (Reddit Help Center, updated 2026-03-28), and it appears in this order:
- promotional content is “not inherently considered to be spam”;
- some communities ban promotion entirely, and “Other communities abide by the 10% rule”;
- “It is ultimately up to you and your team to decide what works best”.
So the ten-percent figure is presented to moderators as one option among several that they may adopt for their own subreddit — sandwiched between a sentence saying promotion is not inherently spam and a sentence saying the choice is theirs. It is a norm you may meet in a given community. It is not Reddit’s rule, and writing your posting plan around it is planning against a rule nobody is enforcing on you.
Where people get burned
The failure mode here is not “you broke a rule”. It is that you obeyed a retired one, felt safe, and never read the rules that actually govern the community you posted in — which are the moderators’, and which the Spam article explicitly tells you to go and read.
What the four venues actually say
Read them side by side and the useful thing is not the overlap. It is how differently four healthy communities answer what looks like one question.
Behavioral, not numeric, and explicitly delegated. The Spam article tells a promoter to “Post authentic content into communities where you have a personal interest”, and, if your contributions are mostly links to your own business, to be thoughtful about frequency or else buy advertising. It also states plainly that “community moderators adjudicate what constitutes unwanted/spammy content”, and instructs you to check whether the community “has specific rules in addition to the guidelines above”. Reddit’s general rules article (Help Center, updated 2025-01-13) says the same thing from the other direction: each community “may set its own rules, which are defined and enforced by the moderators”.
What Reddit does name concretely are behaviors, not proportions: mass-posting for exposure or financial gain, reposting old content to farm karma, link-masking and redirects, and multiple accounts used to inflate numbers.
Hacker News
A qualitative test, stated in two sentences and never quantified: “Please don’t use HN primarily for promotion.” followed immediately by “It’s ok to post your own stuff part of the time”. There is no ratio anywhere on the page. The bright line is elsewhere: “Don’t solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions.” The FAQ answers “Can I ask people to upvote my submission?” with “No”, and spells out the penalty: HN penalizes or bans “submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule”. Note the third noun. The punishment reaches your domain, which outlives any account you were posting from.
Show HN is the sanctioned way to post your own thing, and it has hard entry conditions: it is “for something you’ve made that other people can play with”, which excludes blog posts, sign-up pages and newsletters because they cannot be tried out. The project must be non-trivial, must be something you are around to discuss, and should be easy to try “without barriers such as signups or emails”. Two exclusions matter for a project being monetized: “Don’t post landing pages or fundraisers.” and version bumps are not substantive enough — a major overhaul might be. All quotes as read 2026-08-18; none of HN’s pages carry a date.
Indie Hackers
The honest finding is a negative one, and it is worth more to you than a quote would be: there is no published policy. The guidelines URL renders empty. The footer links exactly three documents — an FAQ, the Terms, and a cookie policy — and none is a code of conduct. The FAQ is a founding story and says nothing about promotion. The Terms of Use contain one spam clause and it is purely technical, prohibiting “any form of auto-responder or ‘spam’ on the Services” alongside scraping; nothing there addresses promotion, link-dropping or ratios. The site is demonstrably active — posts dated within days of this check — so this is a live site with no promotion policy, not an abandoned one.
In place of a policy, the site routes promotion structurally, into purpose-named groups for showing what you made, sharing a project, launching, and building in public, with a per-group guidelines field that group owners fill in themselves. Two consequences. Anything you read attributed to “the Indie Hackers community guidelines” is somebody’s blog post or one group owner’s private text, so do not plan against it. And the only rules that bind you there are the ones inside the specific group you are posting to — which, being behind a sign-in wall, this lesson cannot read for you and you will have to open yourself.
Lobsters
The counterexample, and the reason a universal ratio cannot exist: Lobsters does publish a number, and it is not ten percent. Authors are welcome — the stated worry is people who “exploit it as a write-only tool” — and the guidance is that “self-promo should be less than a quarter of one’s stories and comments”. A quarter, not a tenth. Its spam flag also now covers content “created without meaningful human authorship”, which is a recent and pointed addition.
Two things there will stop you before the ratio ever does. Lobsters runs “a user invitation tree to combat spam”, traces bans back up that tree, and blocks new users from submitting links to domains the site has not seen before — which is precisely the move of arriving and posting your own new project. And its off-topic list names entrepreneurship, management, investing and personal productivity as popular-elsewhere-but-not-here, so a launch or revenue post is off-topic there no matter how favorable your history looks. Read 2026-08-18; the page carries no date.
The pattern underneath the four answers
Four venues, four different shapes of rule. What actually repeats is more specific, and more useful, than “provide value first” — a phrase three of the four never say in any form.
That single observation carries most of the practical weight, because it rules out both of the fixes people reach for. You cannot make a post compliant by wording it better, and you cannot fix a thin history at posting time. “Post now, participate later” fails everywhere by construction. Arriving somewhere with a history is not politeness; it is the actual mechanism.
The second repeat inverts most people’s intuition. Posting your own work is permitted nearly everywhere; soliciting engagement is the thing that gets you banned nearly everywhere. Promotion is tolerated with conditions on all four venues — HN says it is fine part of the time, Reddit tells moderators it is not inherently spam, Lobsters calls author participation great. Asking for an upvote gets a one-word “No” and a penalty that reaches accounts and domains. The nervous new poster usually has this exactly backwards, softening the promotion and then closing with a request for support.
The third is why this lesson refuses to give you a number. The ratio is the least durable part of any of these rules. Reddit demoted its ten percent out of sitewide policy into an option it describes to moderators. HN declines to name a figure at all. Lobsters says a quarter. Three venues, three answers, one of them retired inside the last two years. Any guide printing a universal ratio was wrong on the day it published.
Which leaves the one habit that does not rot: local rules govern, and every platform says so itself. Reddit states that communities define and enforce their own rules and tells you in writing to go read them. Its moderator guidance ends by handing the decision to the mod team. Indie Hackers has no sitewide policy and pushes promotion into groups with owner-written guidelines. Lobsters gates by topic, so being on-topic outranks being well-behaved. Before posting anywhere: open that specific community’s own rules page and read it. That instruction survives every policy revision, because it is an instruction to go and look.
Retrieval check
Same project, same community, two posts. Version A: “Just launched my sports-guides site after six months of work — feedback welcome, and an upvote really helps out a solo dev,” plus the link — from an account whose four previous posts are also links to that site. Version B: a post that lays out the three sources you compared for one rule the guides have to get right, what each one gets wrong, and how you reconciled them; the link appears once, at the end, as where you put the result. One of these gets the account actioned. Which — and what precisely is doing the work in the difference?
Check your answer
A gets actioned, and it does so twice over. The explicit ask for an upvote is the single hardest prohibition across every venue here — Hacker News answers that question with “No” and penalizes submissions, accounts and sites; Reddit files vote-chasing under manipulation rather than under promotion. But the wording is only half of it. The four prior posts are the other half, and they are the part you cannot edit. Every policy on this page judges the account’s history: contributions that are primarily links to a business you run, a site used primarily for promotion, self-promo as a fraction of one’s stories and comments.
What makes B survive is not a better ratio. It is that B hands the reader something before it asks for anything — and hands it to a reader who never clicks the link at all. Someone working with the same messy sources gets the comparison, the specific failure mode, and the reconciliation, whether or not they ever visit your site. Apply the test directly: delete the link and see what is left. B is still a post. A is an empty frame around a request.
Two caveats, because “good post” is not a passport. B is a normal submission on Hacker News, not a Show HN — Show HN needs something a reader can actually play with, not something to read. And on Lobsters, B is fine while your revenue and launch write-ups are not, because those are on the published off-topic list regardless of how your history looks.
What earns attention instead
Nothing in this section is a trick for getting a promotional post accepted. Each item is a consequence of what the four policies actually measure.
- A history that predates the thing you want to promote. Since the judged unit is the account, the work happens before the post. Comments on other people’s threads are the cheapest form of this and the one solo builders skip.
- Something usable by a reader who never clicks. The method, the numbers, the thing that broke and what you did about it. If deleting the link empties the post, the post was an ad.
- Being on-topic before being well-behaved. Lobsters makes this explicit with a published off-topic list, but it holds everywhere: the wrong venue cannot be redeemed by a good post.
- Presence after posting. Show HN requires you to be around to discuss the thing. That is also just what distinguishes a participant from a drive-by, in a community that is measuring exactly that distinction.
- Silence where the request would go. The one line you were going to add at the end — asking for a vote, a share, a signup — is the single highest-risk sentence in the whole post. Delete it.
Check your recall
Answer from memory — no scrolling back.
Hands on
Give the Channel field a venue, and the venue its rules
Done when: PORTFOLIO.md’s Channel field for one project names a specific venue, the date you read that venue’s own rules, the rule most likely to remove your post, and an honest count of your non-promotional history there.
- Open the Channel field you wrote in
learning/monetizing/PORTFOLIO.mdwhen you committed to a single channel. If the committed channel is not posting in public, do this exercise anyway for the venue you would use if it were — the rules-reading habit is the transferable part. - Replace the platform with a venue. Not “Reddit” but one named subreddit; not “Indie Hackers” but one named group. The rules that will actually be applied to you live at that level, and there is no such thing as posting to a platform.
- Open that venue’s own rules page today and record the date you read it. Then write down the single rule there most likely to get your post removed. If the venue publishes nothing — which is the normal case on a site with no sitewide policy — write “none published; norms are set per group” rather than inventing a rule to obey.
- Record the account test honestly: how many posts and comments do you have in that venue that are not about your project, and when were they made? If the answer is zero, the channel is not open yet, and your first action is participation rather than a post.
- Write one line describing what a reader who never clicks the link takes away from the post you intend to make. Then check it by deleting the link and asking whether anything survives.
- Add a re-read date one quarter out. Three of the four venues studied here do not date their policy pages at all, so “I read it once” has a short shelf life.
- Bring the field into the chat. I’ll push on a venue that is really still a platform, on a rules date that is actually a memory, and on any takeaway line that stops surviving the moment the link is removed.
What this does not cover
Posting well is now something you can do repeatedly without burning a venue. What it is not is an answer to whether the effort accumulates. A post earns attention on the day it lands and then decays; a page that ranks, or a loop that brings people back, keeps working while you are asleep. Sorting your distribution work into what compounds and what resets to zero the moment you stop is what comes next — and it is the difference between a channel that pays for itself and one that quietly bills you forever.
Read this next — primary source
Hacker News GuidelinesY Combinator (news.ycombinator.com) — free, about five minutes
It is the shortest complete statement of how a large technical community judges promotion, and it deliberately refuses to give you a number: the test is whether the site is used “primarily for promotion”, which is a claim about your account rather than about any one post. Read it with the FAQ and the Show HN page open beside it. Read it also as what it is — rules written by Y Combinator, a firm with a direct commercial interest in which startups get attention on its own forum. And note that the page carries no date or version stamp anywhere, so re-reading it is the only way to know whether it still says what you think it says.
Stuck, curious, or think this lesson is wrong? Ask your teaching agent. The lessons are the scaffold; the conversation is where the learning gets unstuck.