Be careful when posting on Reddit about my website

I know the title must sound strange to you and under normal circumstances I would not have written this article, but I want to warn you about what I've experienced with Reddit these past few days and that it may affect you if you like my work on this website and decide to share it in one of its communities (I warn you it's a long read).

Well, I've reached a point with the development of this website where I'm limited by the money I can spend on the server, since I refuse to put ads or data collectors, the only way I have to pay expenses is through affiliates and for them to be profitable it means reaching more people. One of the ideas I had in mind with the development was to save money to create an "American bot" to look for offers in dollars because I understand that only offering you offers in euros is "going halfway". To do it properly this implies paying for a VPN, expanding the server with at least 1 gig of RAM and also half a gig of space for the database, for all this the host would charge me about 160 dollars a year without adding taxes. With this in mind I thought that introducing myself on Reddit would be a good idea because it is one of the few communities that are open (in the sense that Google can index them), but what a big mistake, I found that the big subs about PC and games are "bought".

A few days ago I sent private messages to the moderators of /r/pcgaming and /r/gamedeals, a friendly message asking before posting if I could post my open source website:

With pcgaming the response was immediate and it was not positive, they have a commercial agreement with neowin.net to allow advertising from that website every week by posting a list of offers in plain text. You can check it out for yourself, every 7 days exactly there is a post of the weekly offers from that website when theoretically that goes against their own anti-advertising rules. They warned me that due to this agreement if I posted any post about my website it would be deleted and my user banned. I don't know if the bans will apply to other users if you link to my website, but I wouldn't risk it.

Regarding gamedeals, I have never been able to get in touch with the moderators in any way. I was a very active user of that sub in the past and I didn't even know any of them back then. I tried again a few days ago and got 0 replies, so I decided to put a post on gamedealsmeta to introduce myself. I thought that an open source price comparison site for official stores would be welcome given the support they give to isthereanydeal.com. The post was deleted within minutes and to this day I still have no communication with them. At this point I can only theorize based on conversations I've had with community managers of different official stores, that they may have some kind of exclusive commercial agreement with isthereanydeal or that they have taken "paid links" to the extreme in that sub (it's a practice that's spreading on Reddit where if you want a spot you have to pay the moderators monthly since they don't get a salary from Reddit itself). Every post from an official store's community manager that you see on that sub is allowed because they pay around $200-250 a month. I want to think that people aren't stupid and notice it, because they've gone from being one of the most active subs on all of Reddit, reaching the top 20, to hopefully reaching the top 500. In any case, I think it's very likely that if you link to my website on this sub, you'll be banned without warning.

I also thought about contacting the moderators of /r/gaming and /r/pcmasterrace, but frankly I lost the desire to do so after such a disastrous experience. In fact, if I could save up money to create the "American bot" I would spend it on other parts of the site that I also want to improve.