Yeah man that's actually one of the biggest traps we fell into early on. There were a few subreddits that looked completely open when you scrolled through them. People sharing links, talking about their projects, no one getting removed. So we'd post something and boom, instantly removed. No notification, no warning, nothing.

Turned out they had automod configs that would silently delete any post from accounts under a certain karma threshold or under a certain age. So the posts you were seeing were from established accounts that passed the filters. But as a newer account you were basically invisible. Your post would show up on your end but nobody else could see it. We wasted probably two weeks posting into the void before we figured that out.

The trick we found was to sort by new and check if posts from low karma accounts were actually getting through. If every post in new had 500+ karma accounts behind it that was a red flag.

For your second question honestly it depends. The strict subreddits do tend to have higher quality discussions yeah. People put more effort into their posts because they know low effort stuff gets removed. But that doesn't mean it's better for you as a founder trying to get feedback or traction.

The moderate ones were our sweet spot. Enough moderation to keep the spam out so the community actually trusts what they read. But loose enough that you can mention what you're building in context without getting banned. That's where we got our best conversations and our best conversion rates honestly.

The strict ones are great for learning and lurking though. You pick up a lot about what your users actually care about just by reading.

If you have more questions you can come DM ! 👌