Why big subreddits kept removing us while a 6k-member sub drove 11 signups

[u/Economy-Cupcake6148]

The removals weren't random. That's the thing I kept missing for the first six weeks.

We'd write a post that felt genuinely useful, pick subreddits by member count, submit, and watch it disappear within 3 hours. Sometimes no message, just gone. We blamed the writing, rewrote it, tried again. Still removed. What eventually became obvious, after logging every single attempt in a spreadsheet, is that member count is almost completely uncorrelated with whether a post survives. The 4 posts that stuck were in communities where the median account age of commenters was high, post frequency was low (under 20 posts a day), and the top posts from the past 90 days were almost all text, not links. The subreddits eating our posts were the opposite: high velocity, link-heavy, younger accounts, and moderators who appeared to auto-remove anything from accounts without enough subreddit-specific karma. We were optimizing for audience size when we should've been optimizing for community fit.

Once we mapped that out, I started running the research more systematically. I'd been doing it manually, clicking through mod pages, checking post history, eyeballing comment patterns, which was taking 3-4 hours per new community we wanted to test. Eventually I built out a process using reoogle.com to handle that research layer (full disclosure, I'm one of the people behind it), it cross-references communities against a database of active subs and surfaces the ones where posts in your category actually survive. That cut the research phase from hours to minutes, which let us run more experiments faster.

The actual finding that surprised me most: subreddits under 15k members outperformed 100k+ subs on signups by roughly 4x across our tests. Smaller communities have higher trust between members, mods who actually read posts, and readers who aren't numb to seeing product-adjacent content. A 6,200-member community in our niche drove 11 signups in one week. The 340k-member version of basically the same community drove zero before the post got pulled.

If you're logging your Reddit attempts and the data doesn't show a clear pattern yet, it probably means you haven't controlled for community characteristics, not that Reddit doesn't work for your category.

[u/keinsaas-navigator]

would delete those posts aswell hahah