Contributor Quality Score (CQS)

Reddit assigns every account a Contributor Quality Score, a private signal of how genuine the account’s participation looks. Moderators can wire it into automod (the contributor_quality field), so a low-CQS account’s posts are silently filtered before a single human reads them — no matter how good the content is or how carefully it follows the written rules.

That inverts how most marketers think about Reddit. The unit of trust is the account, not the post: months of authentic comments, upvoted answers, and community-first participation raise the score; bursts of promotion, repeated links to one domain, and fresh accounts posting product mentions lower it. It is also why “buy an aged account” schemes fail — behavior resets the score.

Practically: build the account before you need it, keep promotion inside the 90/10 rule, and disclose your affiliation instead of hiding it — stealth marketing is exactly the inauthenticity pattern the score exists to catch. Run drafts through the Reddit pre-flight check before posting, and see the community plays in the ideas library for formats that survive moderation.