Short answer
Inside a subreddit, Reddit’s Hot sort weighs votes against age: votes count logarithmically, and roughly every twelve and a half hours of age cancels out a tenfold lead in votes. On top of that, the Home feed is personalised by machine learning. But on Reddit, communities matter as much as code: moderators, subreddit rules and spam filters decide whether a post is seen at all, and buying or trading votes breaks Reddit’s rules.
Reddit is not one feed but thousands of communities, each with its own rules and its own audience. That makes it different from every other platform in this series.
An algorithm decides how posts are ordered; people decide whether they stay up. Understanding both is the only way to use Reddit well, whether you want readers, customers or visibility in Google.
The main ways Reddit sorts posts
| Sort | What it does |
|---|---|
| Hot | Balances net votes against age, so recent posts that are gaining votes rise |
| New | Shows posts in the order they were submitted |
| Top | Ranks by net votes within a time window such as a day or a year |
| Rising | Highlights recent posts that are picking up votes quickly |
| Best (comments) | Ranks comments by how confidently they can be judged good, not just by raw votes |
| Home feed | A personalised mix based on your subscriptions and activity |
How the Hot formula works
Reddit’s original ranking code was open source, and the Hot formula in it is well documented. It has two parts:
- Votes count logarithmically. The first ten net upvotes count as much as the next ninety, and those as much as the next nine hundred.
- Age counts linearly. Roughly every twelve and a half hours a post ages, it needs about ten times as many votes to hold the same position.
The result is that early votes are disproportionately powerful, and that even very popular posts fade from Hot within a day or so. A post that gets little response in its first hours rarely recovers, however good it is.
Reddit has changed and extended its systems since that code was published, so treat the formula as the foundation rather than the full picture. The principle, votes against time, still describes how community Hot pages behave.
The Home feed is personalised
Reddit’s help pages describe the Home feed as personalised, drawing on the communities you join and the posts you engage with to recommend content, including from communities you have not joined. Reddit has not published that model.
Two people subscribed to the same subreddits can see very different Home feeds. For anyone posting, it means a strong post in a community can also reach interested people outside it, but only if members respond to it first.
Comments and the Best sort
Comments are usually sorted by Best, which Reddit introduced to stop the earliest comment dominating simply because it arrived first. It estimates how good a comment is from its ratio of upvotes to total votes, and becomes more confident as more people vote.
A thoughtful comment posted an hour late can still rise to the top. That makes comments one of the best ways to contribute on Reddit, and one of the main routes for answers to reach Google searchers later.
Communities decide more than the algorithm
- Subreddit rules set what may be posted, from self-promotion limits to required formats.
- Moderators remove posts that break those rules, often within minutes.
- Automated filters, set by moderators, can hold back posts from new or low-karma accounts before anyone sees them.
- Reddit’s own spam systems act on accounts that behave like spammers across the site.
Karma and account age are not ranking factors in the Hot formula, but many communities use them as entry requirements, which is why new accounts often find their posts silently held for review.
Self-promotion
Reddit has long discouraged accounts that exist mainly to promote. An old guideline suggested no more than one in ten of your contributions should be about your own work. Today the real limits are set community by community.
- Read each subreddit’s rules before posting anything about your own product or content.
- Disclose your connection to anything you mention.
- Contribute first, answering questions and joining discussions, so your account has a real history in the community.
Look for the community’s own promotion threads. Many subreddits run weekly or monthly threads where members can share their projects, products or content. Using them is the simplest way to promote your work without breaking any rules.
Choosing the right communities
- Relevance beats size. A subreddit of twenty thousand people who care about your subject is worth more than a giant general one.
- Read the top posts of the past month to see what the community actually rewards.
- Check how strict the rules are on links, self-promotion and formats before you post.
- Do not post identical text across many communities. It looks like spam to members, moderators and filters alike.
What Reddit prohibits
Reddit’s rules ban vote manipulation, including voting from several accounts, asking others to vote together, and paying for votes or comments. Services that sell upvotes are a fast route to removed posts and banned accounts.
Many of the confident Reddit growth guides online are published by those same services, which is worth remembering when reading claims about exact upvote targets.
Reddit beyond Reddit
In 2024 Google and Reddit announced a partnership giving Google access to Reddit content, and Reddit threads now appear prominently in Google results for many questions. Reddit also offers its own AI-powered answers feature built on its discussions.
That changes the value of a good post. On Reddit, a thread fades within a day. In Google and AI answers, a genuinely helpful thread can keep earning visitors for years. Why that happens, and what it means for your own site, is covered in why Reddit and forums outrank your site.
Posts Redditors respond to
- Specific titles that say exactly what the post offers, without clickbait.
- Full value in the post itself, so readers gain something even if they never click a link.
- Readable formatting: short paragraphs, and lists where they help.
- Staying in the thread to answer questions, which keeps the conversation and the votes going.
Redditors are quick to spot marketing dressed up as advice. Honesty about who you are and what you know is the most effective tactic the platform has.
A worked example
Imagine the founder of a small invoicing tool.
- The first approach: a new account posts “Check out my invoicing app” with a link in five business subreddits on the same day.
- The second approach: the founder spends a month answering questions about late payments in a small business community, then shares a detailed post on what they learned chasing overdue invoices, mentioning the tool once and disclosing that they built it.
The first is removed by moderators or filters within minutes, and may get the account flagged. The second earns votes and comments from people who recognise the founder’s name, stays up, and has a chance of appearing in Google for searches about overdue invoices long after it leaves the Hot page.
Diagnosing posts that get no traction
- Check the post is actually visible by viewing the community while logged out. Removed or filtered posts look normal to their author.
- Read the rules again, and check for a removal message or moderator note.
- Check your timing. Posting when the community is quiet costs the early votes Hot depends on.
- Match the community’s size to your goal. Smaller, focused subreddits are easier to reach the top of and more likely to contain the right readers.
- Look at your title. On Reddit, a clear, specific title is often the whole decision to read.
Other platforms weigh things differently. See the X algorithm, the Facebook algorithm and the LinkedIn algorithm.
Want Reddit to work for your brand, not against it?
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