Everyone says "build karma first." The real threshold is 45 days and nobody tells you.

karma was always a proxy. account age is what reddit actually checks. the 45-day number tracks with what I've seen. your ban log is better research than most reddit marketing guides.

This is eye-opening. My account is actually 3 months old, but I barely posted anything until recently. Now I'm trying to engage and my comments still get 1 view.*

So age alone isn't enough — you also need recent activity, right? Reddit sees a 3-month-old account with no history the same as a new account?

How do I 'wake up' an old inactive account without getting flagged? Just start commenting slowly? Or do I need to build up slowly over weeks again?

I'm building Bexra — aHelping entrepreneurs find, build & grow Been stuck on Reddit distribution. This post finally makes sense of why.

MediaFast is a powerful tool for SaaS founders to grow on platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn with structured, proven marketing strategies. It simplifies social growth by providing clear roadmaps to boost visibility, engagement, and sales without risking account bans.

This post hits me hard because I’m going through the exact same thing right now. I kept hearing “just build karma first,” but even when I posted from an account with decent karma, my posts were invisible or auto‑removed. Your breakdown about account age explains the behavior perfectly — it matches my experience almost 1:1. I’m now convinced I need to stop trying to “fix” the account and simply let it age before doing anything promotional. Really appreciate you sharing real data instead of the usual generic advice.

Account age helps, but Reddit bans are driven by a mix of trust signals, not a single threshold like 45 days.

This lines up with something I noticed running Reddit as a distribution channel for clients. We had one account that was about 4 months old with barely any karma, maybe 80 points total. Posted product mentions in relevant threads and never got flagged once. Meanwhile a newer account with 300+ karma from genuine comments got nuked within a week of its first promotional post.

The comment-to-post ratio thing is real too. I tell people to think of it like a real community. If you showed up to a meetup, stood in the corner for a week, then immediately tried to sell everyone on your product, you would get kicked out. But if you had been hanging around for months just chatting with people first, one mention of your thing barely registers as suspicious.

The rest periods point is something most people miss entirely. Consistent daily activity at the same times actually looks more bot-like than irregular bursts. Real humans get busy, go on vacation, have weeks where they barely open the app. That pattern of inconsistency is weirdly what makes an account look legitimate.

Curious whether you have seen any difference between text posts versus link posts for triggering the filter. In my experience, direct links to your own domain are way more likely to get caught than a text post that casually mentions the product name without linking it.

This is the most valuable Reddit breakdown I've read. 6 bans to find the pattern – that's dedication. Account age over karma. Noted.

I had my own "6 bans" moment but with ideas: wasted 6 months building something nobody wanted. That's why I built TrendyRevenue – AI validation that checks demand, competitors, and revenue potential before coding. It's saved me from 3 dead ends already.

Here's what I'd run through your own tool's framework: use the free tier of TrendyRevenue (one analysis, no card) on MediaFast's next feature idea. See if the demand signal matches your intuition. Pro ($39/mo) would give you deeper competitor gaps + source-cited reviews to validate the opportunity.

You clearly think in data. The free report will tell you if your next bet has legs. And if it does, Pro unlocks the evidence to act.

Either way – respect for sharing the real ban data. That's the kind of post that changes how founders approach Reddit.

Interesting dataset, but I wonder if it’s less about a fixed “account age threshold” and more about trust signals accumulating over time (age, activity patterns, subreddit fit, and posting behavior combined).

A 60-day account likely also had more natural-looking engagement history, not just age itself. Did you control for comment/post diversity between the accounts, or were they all behaving similarly before posting?

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Hit this wall yesterday. Tried to publish a 30-day founder log and got blocked because I wasn't "active enough." The frustrating part isn't the rule, it's that the rule isn't documented anywhere visible until you trip over it. 45 days feels long when you're trying to ship momentum, but I get why it exists (spam would be brutal otherwise). Curious what you wish you'd known on day 1 that would've made the wait feel less wasted.

The "why guides get this wrong" section is the most interesting part here. People observe success, note what they did, and teach that — but almost never isolate which variable actually caused the outcome. You built karma + had an old account → it worked → the advice becomes "build karma first." The confounding variable (account age) never makes the list because it was invisible and passive. This is how most growth "best practices" get created: someone's correlation becomes everyone else's dogma. The only way to break that is exactly what you did — run enough iterations to see which variable actually moves the needle.

This is actually something most people underestimate.

Everyone talks about “just post your product,” but platforms like this clearly prioritize contribution patterns over one-time activity. Makes sense from a quality standpoint, but it’s definitely not obvious when you're new.

Curious — did you notice a specific type of activity (comments vs posts) that helped unlock privileges faster?

Although a small sample size test, very interesting results. Thanks for sharing!

This is actually a really interesting insight — most advice I’ve seen focuses only on karma.

The “account age vs. karma” point makes a lot of sense, especially combined with behavior signals like posting frequency and comment ratio.

Curious — did you notice any difference across niches (e.g. SaaS vs general subs), or was the age threshold pretty consistent everywhere?

this is the boring truth nobody markets. same pattern shows up in gmail deliverability, SEO domain authority, even ad accounts. the algorithms care way more about account/domain age than what we obsess over. saves a lot of months once you accept it. also: keeping one mature account warm > spinning up six fresh ones is the real founder play.

this is the boring truth nobody markets. same pattern shows up in gmail deliverability, SEO domain authority, even ad accounts. the algorithms care way more about account/domain age than what we obsess over. saves a lot of months once you accept it. also: keeping one mature account warm > spinning up six fresh ones is the real founder play.

This explains so much.

I've been grinding karma on a new account thinking that was the unlock. Completely missed that I was building on a foundation that couldn't hold anything yet regardless of the number.

The karma metric is just more legible, so that's what every guide teaches. Account age is invisible so it never makes the list.

One thing I'd add from my own observation: subreddit mods seem to manually review flagged posts differently than the auto-filter. Got through the auto-ban once on a young account but a mod caught it two hours later anyway. Age probably affects that manual review threshold too.

Good data. Wish I'd seen this three accounts ago.

This hits close to home. I'm dealing with the exact same invisible threshold on Indie Hackers right now — new account, posted about my product, zero visibility. Not because the post was bad, but because the algo doesn't surface new accounts.

The pattern you found on Reddit (age > karma) seems to apply everywhere. IH, Twitter, even Product Hunt. Platforms reward tenure, not effort. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

$5.4k/mo from 185 users is solid unit economics. Did you validate demand before building, or did the 6 bans basically become your market research?

удачи

Wow. Really insightful product. Here I am sitting over here trying to build my karma when account age is the true gamechanging metric. Going to look into your product. Looks promising for startups. Best, Steff.

The visible vs invisible signals point is the one that explains most failed Reddit strategies. People optimise for karma because it's a number you can see and control. Account age feels passive so nobody talks about it as the variable, but it's the one the filter actually watches. The 45-day threshold is the specific piece that changes the plan. I've been thinking about Reddit as a pre-launch channel and was about to make exactly the mistake you're describing building karma on a relatively new account and wondering why it wasn't working. How does the threshold vary across different subreddit categories, is it consistent or does it shift significantly by topic?

according to my resarch u have to maintain ur account stable first because if ur account remain stable u can start posting in small subreddits and karma will more increase by posting intead of commenting

thanks for sharing i will help a lot for begginners

That's a fantastic study. Thank you for sharing your progress.

This is actually one of the more honest breakdowns I’ve seen about Reddit growth.

The “build karma first” advice always felt incomplete, and your data explains why. People copy what worked once without understanding the underlying variables — account age being the big hidden one.

That said, I don’t think it’s just age vs karma. It’s probably a combination of:

• account age (trust baseline)

• behavior patterns (posting frequency, breaks, comment ratio)

• subreddit-specific moderation rules

Age might get you past the filter, but behavior probably keeps you there.

Also worth mentioning: if your content genuinely fits the subreddit, older accounts amplify that — but they don’t replace it.

Still, the takeaway is solid: you can’t brute-force trust signals on Reddit in 2 weeks, no matter how much karma you stack.

Curious — did you notice any difference between accounts that were actively commenting vs mostly idle during the aging period?

This is a strong story because it flips a widely repeated belief, but the real hook here isn’t “karma vs account age” — it’s that you discovered hidden moderation behavior by observing outcomes at scale.

What makes this interesting is the underlying idea: most people optimize for visible signals (karma, followers, likes), while platforms often enforce invisible ones (trust score, age, velocity, behavior patterns). You basically turned repeated failure into a dataset, then productized the pattern.

That said, one thing worth being careful about is over-fixating on a single factor like “account age.” In reality, Reddit’s systems are likely a mix of signals—age, posting velocity, subreddit trust thresholds, content similarity, and engagement patterns. The risk is users treating this as a deterministic rule set when it’s more probabilistic and adaptive.

Where this gets powerful is if MediaFast evolves from “rules mapping” into a decision system: something that estimates posting risk and success probability per subreddit in real time, not just static thresholds. That would make it less like a guide and more like an operational layer for Reddit growth strategy.

The positioning is already compelling though: you’re not selling growth hacks, you’re exposing the gap between perceived rules and actual enforcement behavior. That tension is what makes people pay attention.

The next leap would be showing not just when to post, but what types of behavior consistently pass filters across different account ages. That’s where this stops being advice and becomes infrastructure.

Really interesting insight — the account age vs karma point is something most people miss.
Quick question — have you thought about scaling the distribution of MediaFast, instead of relying only on your own posts to grow it?
We’ve built a system that helps with that. Happy to share if you're interested.