My first Reddit post got filtered before anyone saw it
Yesterday I wrote a proper post for a SaaS subreddit: a lesson about removing the signup wall, no link, product name once at the end.
It was removed within minutes. Not by a moderator. By Reddit's own spam filter, because my account had 1 karma.
I'd read the subreddit rules carefully and never checked the account itself. The rules were fine. The account wasn't allowed in the room yet.
So for now I'm only answering resume questions, with no links and no product mentions, until the account has some history. It's slower, but it's the only version that doesn't get deleted.
Did you warm up a Reddit account before posting about your product, and how long did it take before posts stuck?
This is great work — reminds me of some of the calls I've had to make building Xstream4K. What would you do differently if you started over?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
One correction to the karma theory that cost me a week: the threshold isn't global, it's per-subreddit, and the SaaS and startup subs set it high on purpose because they get hammered. So "warm up the account" is right but incomplete. Karma earned in a big general sub does almost nothing for you in the sub that filtered you. Karma earned in that sub, or in its close neighbours, does.
Two practical things:
Verify from the outside, never from your own account. Open the sub's /new in a logged-out private window and look for your post. Logged in, a filtered post looks completely normal to you: full text, no [removed] tag, no automod reply. There's no notification either. reveddit will also show you which of your past comments were removed without anyone telling you, and it's usually more than you'd guess.
Don't delete and repost. That pattern is itself a spam signal, and the reposted version tends to get filtered harder than the first one. Message the mods once, politely, with the link. A decent share of the time they approve it, and an approved post also teaches that sub's filter that you aren't spam, which a repost never does.
The thing I'd do differently: spend the first two weeks commenting only, and pick threads where you can answer a technical question in detail rather than ones where you can agree with someone. Agreement earns nothing. A specific answer to someone who is genuinely stuck earns real karma and gets you recognised by the regulars, which ends up mattering more than the number does.
Your instinct to answer resume questions with no links is exactly right, for what it's worth. That's the version that works.
Disclosure: I build Grunz, an AI chat and coding agent, so I've been through this on the same subs you're describing.
The per-sub point is the correction I needed. I'd been assuming general karma carried over. And "agreement earns nothing" is going on the wall. Thanks for the reveddit tip too, checking my old comments now.
"The rules were fine, the account wasn't allowed in the room yet" — I'm hitting the identical gate on IH right now, except here they at least tell you it exists.
Ha, at least IH says it out loud. Hope you're through it soon. What did it end up requiring for you?
This is useful, thanks. I posted my first project on r/SideProject about an hour ago and my post shows fine when I open it directly, but my profile looked empty from a logged-out mirror. Going to check /new in a private window now. Did messaging the mods ever get a held post approved for you, or is it better to just delete and repost later?
Don't delete and repost. Per Grunz's reply above, that pattern gets flagged harder. Check /new logged out first, and if it's missing, send the mods one polite message with the link. Hope r/SideProject lets it through.
The invisible removal is the worst part. Your post shows its full text when you're logged in — no [removed] tag, no automod message — but it never appears in /new. We had a thread that looked normal to us for ten hours before we realized it had been silently held. A post submitted 49 minutes after ours cleared while ours never did.
The subreddit matters more than the karma. We tested the same content across five subs with the same account: one scored us 7 points, another scored every comment 0 across eighteen posts. Same author, same length, same period. The sub-level filter is invisible and account-specific.
Comments first, threads later. The sub that lets your comments through is not necessarily the one that lets your threads through.
Ten hours of looking normal is brutal. The five-sub test is really useful data, thanks. "Comments first, threads later" is basically my plan now.