Account gates
The gate is invisible from outside. Subreddits set their own thresholds through automated moderation, most do not publish them, and a blocked comment usually disappears without a notification. Assume a gate exists everywhere and clear it before it matters.
Enforcement bands by subreddit size
Thresholds scale with member count. Observed tiers:
| Subreddit size | Typical comment karma | Typical account age |
|---|---|---|
| Under 50K | often no gate | none |
| 50K – 500K | 50 – 200 | 7 – 30 days |
| 500K – 5M | 200 – 500 | 14 – 30 days |
| 5M and up | 500 – 2,000 | 30 days or more |
Treat these as planning figures, not published rules. They move, individual subs sit well outside their band, and the only reliable confirmation is a comment that stays up.
How to build the karma
Across varied subreddits, never only the commercial targets. An account whose entire history sits in three subs where the operator has something to sell is a recognizable shape, and moderators of those exact subs are the people most practiced at recognizing it. Interests unrelated to the business are the point, not a distraction from it.
Sustained recent activity beats an old dormant history. An account created years ago and used twice reads worse than a two-month-old account commenting most weeks — dormancy followed by sudden commercial interest is the pattern behind most bought accounts.
Comment karma is the figure that gates. Post karma accumulates differently and does not substitute.
The multi-account rule
Never run multiple accounts for the same product. Major subreddits treat linked accounts as one actor, and detection does not depend on catching an obvious slip — shared behaviour, timing, and interest overlap are enough.
The penalty is not proportionate to the offense. It is a ban of every linked account plus a blacklist of the product domain across that subreddit, which forecloses the channel for everyone at the company including people who never touched it.
Separate accounts run by genuinely different humans, each with their own history and their own interests, are the only accepted version. That is a real constraint on how fast this channel scales, and it should be planned around rather than worked around.
Shadowbans
Invisible from inside the account. Comments appear normally when logged in and are visible to nobody else, which can run for weeks before anyone notices the silence is not just poor performance.
Check periodically by viewing the profile logged out. Build it into the routine rather than reaching for it once results go flat.
Sequencing
- Clear the band for the largest target subreddit, not the smallest. The gate that matters is the highest one.
- Comment without any commercial mention for long enough to have a history that survives a click on the profile.
- Confirm comments are landing — logged-out profile check — before any promotional activity at all.
- Only then start disclosing an affiliation where it is relevant.
Promoting before the account has history removes the post on a first offense and earns a permanent ban on repeats. Most promotional bans are not appealable, so the sequence is worth the wait it costs.