Posted to Reddit for 5 months straight. The posts that survived had one thing in common.

Started treating Reddit as my main distribution channel back in January. No paid ads, no cold outreach, just posting consistently across subreddits where I thought our buyers actually hung out. By month two I had a spreadsheet going: 58 posts, 31 removed, 9 that generated any meaningful traffic. I was obsessing over the wrong things for most of it.

My working theory early on was that timing was the lever. Post when the subreddit is most active, catch the early upvote window, ride the algorithm. Spent a month testing that religiously. Barely moved anything. The posts that got removed at 9am also got removed at 4pm.

What actually separated the surviving posts from the removed ones was how native the framing felt to that specific community. Not just topic relevance, which I thought I had covered, but the way the post assumed shared context. The communities that kept my posts up were ones where I had spent time reading before I ever posted. The ones that removed me fastest were ones I parachuted into cold with content I had basically copy-pasted from a different subreddit that performed well.

The frustrating part is that this is not scalable if you are doing it manually. Reading 15 different subreddits deeply enough to absorb their norms before you post is genuinely time-consuming. I ended up building a lightweight system to track removal rates by community and flag which ones were worth the investment, because doing it by instinct was costing me weeks of wasted effort.

Curious whether others have hit the same wall. Do you treat each subreddit as its own content strategy, or do you find one angle that travels across communities?