Reddit is a forum and to a forum of enthusiasts it is a personal space.
It's more akin to a bar in which they all meet and hang out.
It's possible to research via a bar, just get to know people first and they'll embrace and support whatever you're working on. But to those who wish to just walk into a bar and start trying to perform market research or sales... yeah, know that it comes across as an invasion of personal space.
If anyone wishes to use any forum for successful launch of a project... either your product has to be that good (in which case they'll only trust an existing member saying so) or you should get to know the community first and contribute to it and be a trusted member of it.
I love this analogy! I'm a moderator of r/mtb, and creators have gone as far as to ask me why people aren't interacting with their content. I usually send a short reply about how the community responds to certain types of content, but your post does a good job of explaining why.
I think I'm going to borrow your bar analogy next time I have to warn a fledgling YouTuber about spamming.
I used to run phpBB, then vBulletin, then Vanilla, before finally working with others to write our own. I always ended up running a few forums from the hosting/technical perspective, and then ending up admin/moderator on them... I wanted a way to host many forums multi-tenant in a dirt cheap way, with simpler tooling, a better UX, and with things like events built-in (not in a separate and bad calendar).
As I knew cycling the thing I did was reach out to cycle clubs and groups and just say "I have this thing, if you want to use it you can". I stopped promoting it when I got to 10 forums, but still get a new one apply every month or so. They take a long time to grow, but nearly all of them do grow because they're led by people who really care, and I give basic advice on how to make communities work.
It's more akin to a bar in which they all meet and hang out.
It's possible to research via a bar, just get to know people first and they'll embrace and support whatever you're working on. But to those who wish to just walk into a bar and start trying to perform market research or sales... yeah, know that it comes across as an invasion of personal space.
If anyone wishes to use any forum for successful launch of a project... either your product has to be that good (in which case they'll only trust an existing member saying so) or you should get to know the community first and contribute to it and be a trusted member of it.