Started a Reddit account this week. First comment got auto-deleted before a human even read it.
Added Reddit as a channel this week since LinkedIn's still throttled and Quora's on a forced break. Figured it'd be simple. New account, join some subs, start commenting.
First comment got removed in under a minute. Not because of what I wrote — a bot removed it. Turns out r/marketing requires 30 days of account age and 300 comment karma before AutoMod even lets a comment through. Never got read by a person.
So now I'm doing what I should've done first: starting in the small subs, real questions, real answers, no links, no mention of anything I'm building. Comment karma turns out to be its own weird economy, and I'm back at zero, on a third platform this month.
What's getting me is how invisible this stuff is until you hit it. Every platform has some version of "you need the thing you're trying to get, just to get it." LinkedIn throttles accounts that grow too fast. Reddit gates new accounts from the subs that actually matter. Starting to feel less like bad luck and more like the tax on distribution right now.
Numbers didn't move this week — still sitting at the same email list/visits/sales as last time. All the energy went into fixing infrastructure instead (the Reddit mess above, plus a dead link on my landing page I finally caught).
What's the dumbest gate you've hit trying to get onto a new platform — the one that had nothing to do with what you were actually posting?
The 30-day gate is lead time, not a queue to brute-force. Use it to build a removal-reason map across three smaller relevant subs; 300 karma earned anywhere won’t help if the first eligible comment still reads like channel acquisition.
That distinction actually reframes the whole problem for me — I've been treating the 30-day gate as an obstacle to get past, not as time to calibrate for. The bot flag I hit wasn't a karma issue at all, it was exactly what you're describing: the writing read too structured, too "on message," even though nothing in it was promotional.
Curious what the removal-reason map actually looks like in practice — are you tracking auto-mod triggers vs. actual human mod removals separately, or do they end up pointing at the same tells?