Reddit removed my post about compressing files. So I wrote a blog post about it.

The meta situation

I built ReelNox Studio — a Windows app that compresses video files locally using your GPU. I wrote a tip for r/obs explaining how to shrink OBS recordings from 15 GB to 1.5 GB without uploading anything to the cloud. Useful information. Relevant community. Removed immediately. I tried r/obs again. Removed. r/SideProject. Removed. r/gamedev. Removed. r/software. Removed. I have now posted useful, on-topic content to Reddit over 20 times. Every single post has been removed before anyone could read it. So instead of being useful to the people who needed that tip, I'm writing this — a blog post about a post that doesn't exist, on a platform that doesn't want it.

It's not personal — it's structural

Reddit isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed — just not for people like me. The automod system is built to protect established subreddits from spam. New accounts with low karma get filtered automatically, regardless of content quality. The 'Brand affiliate' tag I disclosed honestly? That's a signal to the filter, not a human review. The result: years of community knowledge, built by people who were once new accounts too, is now locked behind an invisible karma wall that you can only climb by spending months commenting on unrelated threads to prove you're 'real'. I understand why it exists. I still think it's a bad system.

The real problem: there's nowhere to see what happened

What genuinely frustrated me most isn't that posts got removed — it's that there's no clear feedback. You post, it disappears, and you have no idea if it was removed, shadowbanned, pending review, or just buried by the algorithm. Your own profile page gives you almost no useful activity overview. You can't see your post history clearly, you can't see engagement on removed posts, you can't tell if your account is flagged. You're flying blind. For a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users that positions itself as 'the front page of the internet', the UX for new users is genuinely terrible.

The monopoly problem

Here's what bothers me most: Reddit has captured the SEO for almost every niche topic. Search 'compress OBS recordings' and Reddit threads dominate the first page. Which means: the people who need my tip will find a Reddit thread, but they'll never find my post — because Reddit removed it. The platform gets the traffic for the problem. The solution lives somewhere else. Reddit has essentially become a closed garden that controls organic discovery while making it nearly impossible for new, honest contributors to participate. That's a monopoly on intent.

What actually works instead