Reddit marketing cadence per subreddit

The three knobs, in plain terms

Cadence per subreddit is not one number. It is three knobs that all have to agree before the picker lets you post.

The decision the picker runs every time

Before a Reddit thread gets drafted, the picker walks four gates per (project, subreddit) candidate. Any gate that fails removes the candidate from the pool for this run. The remaining candidates go into a weighted draw.

The first three gates are deterministic. They turn an unlimited subreddit list into a small eligible set. The fourth gate is stochastic and runs only among the survivors, which is what stops the picker from getting stuck on the same sub night after night.

Why two defaults, not one

The split between an own-community floor of 1 day and an external-sub floor of 3 days is not aesthetic. The two are policed by completely different reviewers.

Your own community subreddit has one moderator team: you. Mod tolerance for daily posting from your own brand is high because there is no audience expectation that this is anything other than the brand’s home. Reddit-wide spam heuristics still apply, but the subreddit-level removal risk is approximately zero. A one-day floor mostly exists so you do not double-post inside the same UTC window by accident.

External subs are reviewed by a mod team you do not know, and by AutoMod, and by a community whose downvote button is the first line of enforcement. Posting at a 1-day cadence in r/SaaS or r/SideProject (whether you control the cadence or it is just the result of an enthusiastic schedule) reads like brand-spam to all three reviewers. 3 days is the smallest gap that consistently reads as “a person who cares about this community.” Smaller floors require a real contributor history in that sub to survive the same reviewers.

The actual code, not a paraphrase

Here is the candidate builder. Read past the Python syntax and watch how each gate maps to a knob you control inconfig.json.

# scripts/pick_thread_target.py
DEFAULT_OWN_FLOOR_DAYS = 1
DEFAULT_EXTERNAL_FLOOR_DAYS = 3

def build_candidates(config):
    recent = recent_posts_by_sub(max_days=max(
        DEFAULT_OWN_FLOOR_DAYS, DEFAULT_EXTERNAL_FLOOR_DAYS, 14))
    thread_blocked = load_thread_blocked_subs(config)
    candidates = []
    for p in config.get("projects", []):
        t = p.get("threads") or {}
        if not t.get("enabled"):
            continue
        ext_floor = int(t.get("external_floor_days",
                              DEFAULT_EXTERNAL_FLOOR_DAYS))
        own = t.get("own_community")
        if own:
            own_floor = int(own.get("floor_days", DEFAULT_OWN_FLOOR_DAYS))
            slug = norm_sub(own.get("subreddit"))
            if slug not in thread_blocked:
                last = recent.get(slug)
                if last is None or last >= own_floor:
                    candidates.append((p, own, True, own_floor, last))
        for sub in t.get("external_subreddits") or []:
            slug = norm_sub(sub)
            if slug in thread_blocked:
                continue
            last = recent.get(slug)
            if last is not None and last < ext_floor:
                continue
            candidates.append((p, sub, False, ext_floor, last))
    return candidates

And the halving formula that runs over the survivors. This is the line that decides which of two eligible projects gets to ship tonight.

# Project-level halving: every original you posted
# in the last 7 days halves your odds against a peer
# that has not posted at all.
weights = [
    by_project[n]["project"].get("weight", 1)
    / (1 + recent_project_counts.get(n, 0))
    for n in names
]
chosen_name = random.choices(names, weights=weights, k=1)[0]

A project with base weight 15 that already shipped twice this week competes as 15 / 3 = 5. A peer project at base weight 10 that has not shipped at all competes as 10 / 1 = 10, so it wins the draw on most rolls. That is the entire mechanism that keeps any one product from monopolising your nightly Reddit slot.

Tuning per subreddit, not per platform

The defaults are a floor, not a recipe. Every entry in your subreddit list deserves its own override based on how the sub actually reacts to you. Four signals tell you which way to push the per-sub floor.

What this looks like in config.json

Concretely, here is one project block (slightly trimmed). The own-community floor lives inside the own_community object. The external floor is one number that applies to every entry in external_subreddits unless an entry carries its own override.

"threads": {
  "enabled": true,
  "posting_account": "<your username>",
  "external_floor_days": 3,
  "own_community": {
    "subreddit": "r/your_brand_sub",
    "cadence": "daily",
    "floor_days": 1
  },
  "external_subreddits": [
    "r/SaaS",
    "r/SideProject",
    "r/indiehackers",
    "r/Entrepreneur"
  ]
}

If a sub deserves a stricter floor (say r/Entrepreneur is removing your threads), promote it from a bare string to an object carrying its own floor_days. The picker reads either shape.

The most common cadence mistake

Treating cadence as a per-account schedule (“3 posts a week, evenly spaced”) is what gets accounts shadowbanned. That schedule says nothing about which subreddit each post lands in, and 3 posts a week into the same 4 subs is 36 posts per sub per quarter. The subreddit-level reviewer sees that number; the platform-level reviewer does not.

The fix is to invert: pick the subreddit first, check its floor, then post. The account-level cadence emerges as a side effect of which subs are eligible tonight, not as a target you aim at.

Where the cadence stops being a number

Below a certain density (say one original thread per sub per week, plus three or four comments) the floor stops being the binding constraint. What matters is whether each thread reads as a real contribution. A 5-day floor with low-effort content gets you removed faster than a 2-day floor with one specific observation that only this sub would find useful.

Floors exist to keep you from being obviously a marketing schedule. They do not exist to make low-effort content survive. That part is on the draft.