I read a week of moderator notes from 51 founder communities. Links got removed far more than AI text
Before posting in a community now I read its AutoModerator notes first. Last week I did it for 51 founder and marketing communities, seven days of removals.
Links and self-promotion were the biggest single reason posts came down, 574 of the 2,198 notes.
AI-written content was a much smaller share, and nearly all of it came from one room. In r/SaaS, 91 of the latest 100 notes read "Low-Effort/AI content is auto-removed".
r/microsaas was the strictest on links, with 98 of its latest 100 notes.
A removed comment still looks normal to the person who wrote it, so it's easy to never find out.
What has worked for me since is answering the question with no link and letting people ask for more. Of the 26 communities I've read closely, only 11 let you post freely, but commenting is open in 13 of the other 15.
Busy rooms cap at 100 notes on the archive, so their counts are floors. I run Kasspian, which does this check before it hands anyone a thread, and I'm happy to put the room by room table in the comments.
Which community has removed you, and did you ever find out why?
This is useful, although I reckon the labels may be measuring how easy something is to identify as much as what communities actually dislike. A link is objective; “AI-written” is much harder to prove, and some of it may be filed under low-effort or self-promotion instead.
Did you normalise similar removal reasons across the 51 communities, or keep each moderator’s original label? That breakdown could change the conclusion quite a bit.
You're right, and it's the biggest caveat. I normalised rather than keeping the raw labels. Each AutoModerator note got sorted by the words in it, so anything mentioning AI, ChatGPT or "Low-Effort/AI" counted as AI, then links, promotion or affiliates counted as links, then karma, then other removals.
So it measures what each room's automod says out loud, not what the mods dislike. r/SaaS names AI in its note, most rooms don't, and anything a human mod removes quietly isn't in the count at all. I'd read it as links being easy to catch, more than AI being tolerated.
That distinction helps. The ordering rule matters too, since a note mentioning both AI and links gets counted as AI. A small overlap table showing how many notes matched multiple categories would make the result easier to interpret. The stronger conclusion may be that links are detected and explained more consistently, rather than disliked more.
I ran the overlap you suggested, on this week's notes (51 of the 54 rooms, 2,184 notes, the 7 days to today, so a different week from the post).
Zero notes matched both AI and links, so the ordering didn't move a single link removal into the AI column. The only overlaps were with karma, 6 AI plus karma and 24 links plus karma. AI matched 118 notes and 89 of those were r/SaaS again.
One honest change this week. Karma and account-age gates (567) edged out links (526) as the most common reason, so links being first held for the week in the post but isn't a rule. I think your framing is the right one, links just get explained more consistently.
That’s a solid follow-up, thanks for actually running it.
Zero AI/link overlap is useful because it removes one possible distortion, and the karma shift is probably the bigger lesson: the “top reason” can move week to week, but the practical advice stays similar. New accounts, links and obvious promo are the risky surfaces.
I’d almost frame the output as “what gets mechanically caught and explained” rather than “what communities dislike most.” That makes the data more defensible, and probably more useful for founders deciding how to participate without getting silently filtered.
Taking your framing. What the notes measure is what gets mechanically caught and explained, not what a community dislikes, and that is the honest line for the write-up.
The practical version, for anyone reading this later: the risky surfaces are a new or low-karma account, a link, and a post that reads as promotion, and the first two are checked before a human sees you.
Karma is the one I had underrated. 567 notes this week, and most of them name a threshold you cannot see until you have already tripped it. The other half of the problem is that removals are silent, so the only reliable check is to open your own post in a logged-out window an hour later.
That logged-out check is the painful but useful bit. A post can look alive to the person who wrote it while being invisible to everyone else, which makes founders misread silence as rejection.
I’d probably make that a standard launch checklist item now: post, wait, check logged out, then check again after edits or link changes. Boring, but it prevents a whole day of “why did nobody respond?” when the answer was simply “nobody could see it.”
Good write-up. The caveats make the data more useful, not weaker.
Room by room access reads are here: https://kasspian.com/rooms?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=comment&utm_campaign=modlogs-0918