9 weeks tracking Reddit removals for my SaaS. The variable that actually mattered was

Post original

Started with the assumption everyone starts with: the posts that die are badly written. Tightened the hook, varied the length, tested questions vs statements. Spent probably three weeks on copy iteration alone. Removal rate barely moved. The thing that actually correlated with survival was how recently the subreddit had removed a similar post. Not the topic. Not the format. The removal history of the specific community in the days before I posted. Subs that had just nuked something similar were in a kind of heightened state, moderators more alert, automod thresholds probably twitchy. Posting into that window was just burning the submission. Anyway, once I started treating subreddit selection as a timing problem rather than a targeting problem, the numbers changed pretty fast. Went from roughly 6 removals in a two-week stretch to 2 in the following four weeks across the same number of submissions. Same copy, different sequencing. The research overhead got annoying enough that I started automating it with reoogle.com , mostly to track removal patterns across communities without doing it manually in a spreadsheet. That part I don't miss. What nobody tells you is that the subreddit database you're working from matters more than how good your post is. Most founders are fishing from a list of 30 communities they found in someone else's post, never updated, probably two years stale. The communities that are actually tolerant of founder content right now aren't the ones on any list I've seen shared here. They're smaller, newer, and weirdly specific. Those are the ones keeping posts up.   submitted by   /u/Economy-Cupcake6148 [link]   [comments]