The subreddit I thought was perfect for my launch was a ghost town. Here's how I figured it out before wasting a week.

I spent days crafting a launch post for r/remotework. It had 2M+ members, perfect audience for my async communication tool. The day before posting, I had a sinking feeling. I went deep into the sub's recent posts. The top post from last week had 12 upvotes. The mod's last comment was 8 months ago. The entire front page was spammy blog links. The community was dead, just kept alive by bots. I almost posted anyway, desperate for any eyeballs. Instead, I took a step back. I used Reoogle to scan for truly active communities around remote work and async collaboration. I filtered out the ones with clear mod inactivity signals. I found a smaller sub (80k members) where the top post had 200+ comments from yesterday. That's where I posted. It didn't go viral, but I got 30+ genuine comments, solid feedback, and 5 signups. The key was realizing that member count is a vanity metric. Real activity is what matters. A tool that surfaces mod activity and posting heatmaps (https://reoogle.com/) saved me from the classic mistake of preaching to an empty room. How do you vet a community's 'real' activity before investing time in it?