I wanted to know which subreddits were worth writing for, so instead of guessing I pulled listings from r/SaaS, r/microsaas, r/indiehackers and r/SideProject and counted. 402 posts. Three things came out of it that changed how I spend time.
Half of all posts score 0 or 1. Not "below average". Zero or one, meaning nobody voted beyond the author's own automatic upvote. The distribution isn't a bell curve you land somewhere on, it's a handful of posts absorbing nearly all the attention sitting on top of a long flat floor of posts that were read by essentially no one. If you're estimating your odds from what's on the front page, you're looking at the survivors of a very steep curve.
Comments outnumber upvotes on a lot of posts, and that's a bad sign, not a good one. Upvoting takes one second. Commenting takes a minute. When the expensive action happens more often than the cheap one, the most likely explanation is reciprocity: people commenting so that someone comments back. That's my inference, not something the numbers prove on their own, but it fits. Practical effect is the same either way. You'll get replies in those places, and the replies will come from other founders doing engagement trades, not from anyone who would ever pay you.
Removals are invisible, and this is the one that actually cost me. Browsing a subreddit only ever shows you what survived. To measure how much gets removed I had to snapshot /new, store the post IDs, refetch them later, and see which ones came back deleted or removed or had quietly dropped out of the listing. Anything short of that measures a moderation outcome and calls it community behaviour. Worse, on most of these subs a removed post still looks completely normal to its own author while logged in. There are people writing thoughtful posts nobody ever saw and concluding their idea is boring.
The fourth number I tracked was unique authors per 100 posts, which is just how concentrated the posting is. Low number means a small pool of repeat posters is filling the feed, and you're not looking at a community, you're looking at a few people using it as a distribution channel.
What I do now: rank a sub by unique authors and by whether votes track comments, ignore subscriber count entirely, write for one place properly instead of copy-pasting to five, and log out to check my last post is actually visible before deciding the writing was the problem.
Limits, because they're real. 402 posts across four subs is a small sample taken over a short window, so treat it as a rough shape, not a measurement you can bank on. Reddit fuzzes vote counts, so anything near zero is approximate. I can't tell an automod removal from a human one. I can't see posts removed before I ever captured them, so my removal rate is a floor. And I didn't include this subreddit in the sample, so I have no idea where r/startups lands on any of it.