What subreddits have you found that actually allow and encourage self promotion?

Thank you everyone for your replies! I understand the concept of not just spamming promotional stuff on Reddit, and engaging with the communities instead. Value before the ask, yadda yadda yadda. My newsletter has seen the most growth from this exact method. I had just recently seen a post on here that covered some of the subreddits specifically for self promotion, so I was looking to be reminded of those specific subs. r/sideproject was one, but couldn't find the others.

Thanks again!

Basically no one wants to read self promotion. If some group would allow this, it would simply be a spam-fest. Why would anyone want that?

There are subreddits that can be used to post about your product. Such as the mentioned /r/sideproject. But it's not for self promotion. It's for collecting feedback. If you are just posting your thing there to promote it, you are doing it wrong.

Generally speaking, don't self promote. It's just sad and spammy. Instead, ask for feedback. Ask what you can do to make your thing better. Then follow-up on that and really improve your product. Start dialogues. Get beta testers.

When in doubt, contact the subreddit's moderators and ask whether you can post before you do. If you do this, and you are not being a spammy self promoter, they will mostly say yes.

Also keep in mind the golden rule of Reddit: Websites don't have Reddit accounts, but a Redditor can have a website. That is, if your only purpose of using Reddit is to promote something, you will just get banned sooner or later.

I'd say r/SideProject is the best. In general I use Postpone.app to schedule posts on Reddit and pretty sure they warn you when the subreddit has a rule against self-promotion, but I could be wrong. Either way, I wrote a guide about how I go about posting to Reddit and finding relevant subreddits, which you can find here - I hope it's useful!

In general every thriving community will try to put guards to filter out what they consider spam. Maybe try to create a post that is about looking for beta testers for avatar generator project? Or try to share some knowledge and write something about AI avatar generation techniques and impact on the community? In general, might be worth trying to contribute to a given subbredit and creating the content they'd be interested in.

The product hunt subreddit is pretty good for this.

However, usually those subreddits are filled more with ppl looking to self promo rather than contribute

Also curious to see what everyone has to share!