Amazon affiliate on Reddit, audited. 9 of 15 subs we checked ban the link. Here is the exact rule text.

Reddit's sitewide policy does not ban Amazon affiliate links, but individual subreddits do and many of the largest affiliate-adjacent ones do. S4L parses r/{sub}/about/rules.json before drafting. In a live audit on 2026-04-19 across 15 Amazon-relevant subs, 9 subs (60%) triggered at least one ban tag. r/affiliatemarketing bans referral tags explicitly in rule 1: 'Linking with referral tags and tracking codes is prohibited.' r/sidehustle bans 'affiliates / referrals and survey links' in rule 1. r/AmazonAffiliate and r/AmazonAffiliates, which exist for this specific purpose, triggered no ban tags. The safe operating assumption is that any general-purpose sub with more than ~100k members has explicit affiliate-link rules, and you should read them before posting.

Before drafting any reply, S4L looks up the subreddit's tag set from the output of scripts/check_link_rules.py. The classifier runs 12 regex patterns against r/{sub}/about/rules.json and r/{sub}/about.json, producing tags like hard_no_links, no_self_promo, no_referral, no_blog_links, link_requires_approval, text_only, and ratio_rule. If hard_no_links or no_referral fires, the drafting prompt is forced into Tier 1 (no link, pure value). If only no_self_promo fires, the comment can carry a contextual mention but not an affiliate URL. If the sub carries no ban tags, Tier 2 and Tier 3 (soft mention or explicit link on request) become eligible, and the scoring layer still suppresses Tier 3 unless OP asked for a link.

The full list lives in scripts/check_link_rules.py in the social-autoposter repo. Short form: (1) r'no (photos?|links?|videos?|urls?|images?)' -> hard_no_links; (2) r'(links?|urls?) (are )?not allowed' -> hard_no_links; (3) r'no self[- ]?promotion' -> no_self_promo; (4) r'no (advertising|ads|promo)' -> no_self_promo; (5) r'no (referral|affiliate)' -> no_referral; (6) r'no (blog|youtube|substack|medium) (link|post)' -> no_blog_links; (7) r'links.*require.*approval' -> link_requires_approval; (8) r'link posts? (are )?(banned|disallowed|not permitted)' -> hard_no_links; (9) r'submissions? must be text' -> text_only; (10) r'self[- ]?posts? only' -> text_only; (11) r'(\d+):1 (self[- ]?promotion|promo) (rule|ratio)' -> ratio_rule; (12) r'9:1' -> ratio_rule. The classifier runs against both the structured rules list and the sidebar description, and the tags are unioned. A miss in the regex does not mean the sub allows the link, it only means the rule language did not match any pattern; many subs enforce norms their rules do not state.

Only two in this 15-sub sample cleared with zero ban tags AND have a purpose-built posture toward affiliate marketing: r/AmazonAffiliate and r/AmazonAffiliates. Both are niche, small, and filled with other operators rather than buyers, so click-through is low even when the link survives. r/passive_income, r/SideProject, r/marketing, and r/digital_marketing also cleared the regex but carry strong community norms against naked affiliate URLs, so a bare amzn.to drop will typically get downvoted fast even if not auto-removed. The working rule is: any sub whose audience is buyers of a specific vertical (r/homekitchen for kitchen gear, r/homeimprovement, r/BuyItForLife) beats any general affiliate-marketing sub. Always re-check with the audit script before assuming a sub is safe; rules change without announcement.

Yes in principle, with three constraints that interact with Reddit norms. First, the Associates Operating Agreement requires a plain-language disclosure near the link, which on Reddit usually means the line 'affiliate link' in parentheses. Second, affiliate links in closed or private communities are prohibited, so private subreddits and invite-only Discord rings are off-limits. Third, hidden-destination shorteners are not allowed; the Amazon host has to be visible. Reddit-specific norms stack on top: most subs require the link to be genuinely helpful to the specific thread, most expect the comment to include substantive non-link content, and any sub with a 9:1 or 10:1 rule (flagged by S4L as ratio_rule) caps you at one link for every nine value comments. The ratio_rule regex also fires on the literal string '9:1', which catches subs that reference the rule in their sidebar without restating it.

Three failure modes, usually in this order. Automod removes the comment within seconds if the sub runs a link-matching rule (most hard_no_links subs do). If Automod misses it, other commenters report it within minutes and human mods remove it plus apply a temp or permanent ban. If both pass, the comment survives but scores poorly: across 2,732 S4L-tracked Reddit comments, comments containing any URL averaged 1.38 upvotes vs 3.02 without, and comments mentioning a product name averaged 1.17 vs 3.05 without. Amazon product links specifically tend to get downvoted harder than neutral links because readers correctly assume affiliate intent. The measured expected value of a link in a no_referral sub is strictly negative, which is why the S4L drafting prompt refuses to generate one.

No, and this is one of the riskier moves because it stacks violations across both platforms. Most subs that carry hard_no_links or no_referral tags also maintain an Automod rule that matches against known shortener domains (bit.ly, tinyurl, goo.gl, amzn.to) in addition to the Amazon host. The Associates Operating Agreement separately requires the Amazon host to be visible, so hiding it under a generic shortener is also a program violation. The only shortener Amazon sanctions is amzn.to itself, which already gets pattern-matched by most subreddit Automods. The audit pipeline treats any shortener in a comment the same as a naked affiliate link for tagging purposes.

The check_link_rules.py script takes ~25 seconds to run for 15 subs including the 1.5-second sleep between calls. The full S4L subreddit list runs weekly on a launchd timer. Rules change quietly: a mod team will add an affiliate-link ban on Tuesday with no announcement, and by Wednesday the old cached tag set is wrong. Re-running catches the change. For a manual operator without S4L, the minimum viable cadence is to re-check any target sub before a posting sprint, which takes one curl and about ten seconds per sub.