Yesterday I wrote about posting on Reddit 5 times in March without a single post making it through.
Today is Day 30.
Thirty days is the threshold Reddit mentions for some subreddits. r/webscraping runs a monthly self-promotion thread — the one place where account age matters more than karma. I'd been marking this day on the mental calendar since March 2.
So. Did the wall come down?
What Day 30 Actually Means
Let me be precise about what changes at 30 days on Reddit:
- Account age: Some subreddits require 30-day-old accounts before you can post or comment. This gate opens.
- Karma: Still 1. This doesn't change automatically. Nothing unlocks based on time alone here.
- r/webscraping monthly thread: Posted at the beginning of each month. Available to comment if the thread is live and you meet the age requirement.
The karma wall doesn't fall at Day 30. It just means one specific door — the monthly self-promo thread — should theoretically be accessible now.
The March Score
Before checking whether Day 30 matters, the Month 1 Reddit summary:
Posts submitted: 5
Posts visible to public: 0
Reason: Spam filter (new account + external links = automatic shadow removal)
| Subreddit | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|
| r/webscraping | Mar 3 | Monthly thread comment — unverified |
| r/dataisbeautiful | Mar 4 | Spam filter removed |
| r/Korea | Mar 4 | Moderator approval queue |
| r/kpop | Mar 7 | Spam filter removed |
| r/mcp | Mar 10 | Spam filter removed |
Karma going into Day 30: 1.
Meanwhile: What Was Actually Working
Here's the number Reddit didn't give me — but something else did.
Total API users by March 31: 94
Referral source breakdown (March, all sessions):
- Direct / no referrer: 71.8%
- Google organic: 13.1%
- Apify Store internal: 8.4%
- Reddit: 0.55%
- Naver Search: 0.39%
- ChatGPT referrals: 0.31%
- Perplexity: 0.30%
Reddit drove 0.55% of sessions.
The Apify Store itself — people browsing for scraping tools — drove 8.4%. That's 15x more than Reddit. Google drove 24x more.
I spent probably 3 hours in March on Reddit strategy: drafting posts, picking subreddits, timing submissions. Those 3 hours generated less traffic than the SEO work I did on actor descriptions in one sitting on March 6.
What r/webscraping Taught Me Without Letting Me Post
The most useful thing about trying Reddit wasn't the traffic (0.55%). It was the forcing function.
Writing for r/webscraping made me articulate: what is this, for who, and why does it matter to a developer?
That's a harder question than "what does this scraper do." The answer to that question is what made the Dev.to posts work. It's what made the Apify Store descriptions findable.
I wrote 5 Reddit posts that got filtered. But the thinking that went into them produced 35 Dev.to posts that didn't.
Did the Wall Come Down?
Here's the honest answer: I tried to check the r/webscraping thread on April 1. The attempt didn't go through cleanly — Reddit's access patterns are unpredictable for automated tools.
What I know:
- Day 30 arrived. The account is old enough.
- Karma is still 1. Some subreddits need more.
- Whether the specific r/webscraping April self-promo thread is live and whether my comment lands — I'll know in a day or two.
What I also know: the 94 users who found the API didn't come from Reddit. They came from search, from Apify's own discovery, from a category that Reddit can't replicate — people who were already looking for Korean data tools.
Reddit is audience creation. Google is audience capture. I built something people were searching for. The first 30 days validated that.
The next 30 days: I'll keep an eye on whether the Reddit door actually opens. But I'm not waiting for it.
Actual Update (if you're reading this from a future Dev.to notification)
If the r/webscraping comment goes through, I'll update this post.
Current status as of publish: unknown, monitoring.
I'm building Korean web scraping APIs on Apify. Follow for more build-in-public posts — I share actual numbers, not just milestones.
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