Tried Reddit ads for our D2C brand and the results were weird

Okay so I started it as a college project in which we are running a small EDC brand and ran a small campaign targeting niche product subreddits last month. CPC was around $1.2 which is way cheaper than meta but conversion rate was all over the place.

One subreddit gave us 8% conversion, another gave us 0.3% with the exact same creative. What threw me off was the comments. Half the people loved the authenticity, other half called us out for "disguised advertising" even though it was literally a promoted post. 

It feels like reddit either works incredibly well or crashes hard depending on community vibe. No middle ground

Anyone running D2C ads on reddit consistently????