There is a recurring disappointment in this audience: someone spends four months building something, posts it to five subreddits, and watches four of the posts vanish within the hour. The problem is almost never the project. It is that four of those five communities were never places where projects go.
Two kinds of community, and the difference matters
Showcase communities exist for the purpose of people posting things they made. The implicit contract is that you look at other people's work as well as posting your own. Feedback is the currency, and posts that arrive, drop a link and leave get ignored even when they survive moderation.
Topic communities exist to discuss a subject. Your project is relevant there only when it answers a question somebody asked. Posting it unprompted is promotion, and the fact that you built it yourself does not change that.
Almost every complaint about a removed project post comes from treating the second kind as the first.
Communities where projects belong
The list below separates the places designed for showing work from the ones where a project only fits inside an existing discussion.
| Subreddit | What gets asked there | Promotion tolerance |
|---|---|---|
| r/SideProject | Launches, works in progress, feedback on specific decisions, early traction questions | High — showing work is the purpose |
| r/AlphaandBetaUsers | Recruiting testers, trading early feedback between builders | High — that is the stated purpose |
| r/roastmystartup | Blunt critique of landing pages, positioning and pricing | High — you are asking to be criticised |
| r/indiehackers | Revenue and distribution posts, launches with real detail attached | Moderate — with disclosure |
| r/InternetIsBeautiful | Genuinely novel, free, immediately usable web things | Low — commercial products are usually rejected |
| r/SomebodyMakeThis | Requests for products that do not exist yet, and occasional replies from builders | Low — but valuable for validation |
| r/webdev | Stack and implementation discussion, with periodic showcase threads | Very low outside those threads |
| r/Entrepreneur | Business questions where a project is context rather than the subject | Very low |
How to write a show post that gets comments
A link and a sentence is the default, and it performs poorly. The posts that accumulate comments follow a recognisable structure.
Start with what problem you had. Personal motivation is the most reliable hook in showcase communities because it makes the project a story rather than an advertisement.
Say what you built it with and what it costs to run. This audience is largely technical and will engage with implementation detail far more than with features.
Ask one specific question. "Feedback welcome" produces nothing. "I cannot decide whether to charge per seat or per project, and here is why both feel wrong" produces a thread.
Include what is broken. Admitting the mobile layout is bad or the onboarding confuses people invites help instead of criticism, and it signals that you are not selling.
What gets removed
Posting the same project to several communities within a short window is the most common cause of a site-wide filter catching you, independent of any individual community's rules.
Link shorteners, tracking parameters and referral links get posts removed in most showcase communities. Post the plain URL.
Waitlist pages with nothing behind them are increasingly rejected as a category. If a visitor cannot see or use anything, many communities treat the post as lead generation rather than a project.
Reposting the same project repeatedly is tolerated far less than builders expect. A meaningful update after months is usually fine. A new screenshot every fortnight is not.
What to do after the post
The comments are the actual value, and most builders waste them. Reply to every one, including the dismissive ones, and reply with detail rather than thanks.
Watch for the comments that describe a use case you did not design for. Those are the most commercially useful output of a launch post, and they rarely appear in analytics.
Then keep participating. A showcase community you only visit on launch day gives you one burst of traffic and nothing else. Builders who comment on other people's projects regularly get noticeably better response when they post their own, which is not favouritism so much as recognition.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Questions about posting side projects
Why was my project post removed with no explanation?
Most removals in this area are automated rather than moderator decisions. New accounts, link shorteners, tracking parameters, and posting the same URL across multiple communities in a short window all trigger filters before a human sees the post.
How many subreddits should I post a launch to?
Two or three, spaced over several days, each rewritten for that community. Simultaneous cross-posting of identical text is the pattern spam filters are specifically built to catch.
Do launch posts actually bring users?
A good post in a showcase community typically produces a modest burst of traffic and a handful of signups. The durable value is the feedback and the use cases you did not anticipate, not the traffic spike.
Is it worth posting a project that is not finished?
Often it works better. Unfinished projects invite suggestions, while finished ones invite judgement. Being explicit about what is missing tends to raise the quality of the comments.
FIND THE PEOPLE ASKING FOR IT
Somebody already described the product you built.
MentionSpot scans Reddit and X for the problems your project solves, so you can reply to a real request instead of posting into a void.
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