Reddit was deleting our comments for two days and we had no way of knowing
We are building our pre-launch presence the way everyone says to: answer questions, be useful, do not pitch. Reddit seemed to be going fine. Then I checked properly and found that every comment we had left in one subreddit had been removed within seconds of posting.
The part worth knowing is that we could not see it. A removed comment still looks completely normal to the person who wrote it. It sits there on the thread when you visit your own profile. The only signal is a bot reply, and that lands under Notifications rather than your inbox, so if you are not looking for it you will not find it. We lost two days before noticing.
The mechanism is something called Contributor Quality Score. It is a site-wide score Reddit assigns your account, separate from karma, and subreddits can set automod to reject anyone below a threshold. You are not shown your score anywhere in the interface.
There is a way to check it. A subreddit called r/phcareers runs a public thread where you comment and a bot replies with your band: lowest, low, moderate, high or highest.
Ours came back as high. Second of five. And a comment still got removed for low CQS in that same subreddit the same afternoon.
So the score is real, but the message is not always the reason. Either that sub requires the top band, or the CQS wording is a catch-all for a different filter. We have stopped posting there, partly because removals themselves lower your score, so every attempt was quietly damaging our standing in the subreddits where we were doing fine.
Two things I would pass on. Check Notifications, not your profile, if you want to know whether your comments are surviving. And comment karma is a useful canary: ours sat at zero for days while we believed we were building a presence.
What I have not solved is which subreddits gate on this. It seems to be entirely at each mod team's discretion and none of them publish the threshold. Has anyone mapped this, or found a cleaner way to tell whether a community is actually reachable before you spend a fortnight talking to nobody?
Replies
the r/phcareers trick is clever but you already found its limit - it tells you your score, not whether a specific sub will actually let you through, and you found out those two things don't line up. the more reliable check might just be simpler and dumber: before you invest a fortnight in a subreddit, post one low-stakes comment on some old, unrelated thread there and then go look at it logged out, or from a browser you're not signed into. a removed comment is invisible to a logged-out viewer but still visible to you, which matches exactly the blind spot you're describing - it costs you one comment and a few minutes instead of two days of comments you thought were landing. doesn't solve the "which subs gate on this" mapping problem, but it turns every future subreddit into a five-minute test instead of a slow bleed you only catch by accident.