Submitted to 40 subreddits over 8 weeks. Strictest communities drove the most traffic.

Started with the assumption that posting volume was the lever. More subreddits, more surface area, more chances for something to stick. Eight weeks later, that assumption was completely wrong.

The subreddits with lax moderation and no karma floors removed posts inconsistently, which felt fine at first. But the posts that survived there got buried. Low engagement, low trust signals from the community, nothing compounding. The subreddits that rejected half my posts upfront turned out to be the ones where surviving posts actually converted to real traffic and real replies.

The pattern I didn't expect: strict communities seem to have members who actually read and respond rather than scroll past. When a post makes it through, the signal-to-noise ratio is high enough that people engage with it seriously. The removal rate stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like a filter telling me whether my framing was right for that specific audience.

What I still can't figure out is whether this compounds or resets. Once you've built a history in a strict subreddit, does the community extend more trust to future posts, or does every post get evaluated cold regardless of your account standing? Curious if anyone else has tracked this across multiple communities over a longer window.