r/webdev: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

The room runs from people who only know HTML and CSS to developers with 16 years behind them, and both post. Technical arguments in the comments assume real experience, with people debating CSS scoping and separation of concerns without explaining terms. Open-ended beginner and career questions are not answered in the main feed: the rules send them to the FAQ, a beginner thread and a pinned monthly career thread, and a vague question can be removed as low effort.

• Working front-end and full-stack developers arguing about tooling, CSS and frameworks.
• Solo developers and hobbyists showing a side project on Saturday and asking for feedback.
• Beginners with a specific bug, often saying up front that they are new.
• Employed developers weighing up freelancing and asking how to find first clients.
• People who built something with AI coding tools and want it looked at, which gets a mixed reception.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/webdev.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up31%
• Removed by Reddit's filters16%
• Removed by moderators50%
• Deleted by the author4%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

What happened when we posted here

We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.

Stayed up

97%

Removed by Reddit's filters

0%

Removed by moderators

3%

Period

September 2025 to July 2026

The rules, in the mods' words

1. 1

   No vague support questions about WYSIWYG editors or other software.

   No vague product support questions (like "why is this plugin not working" or "how do I set up X"). For vague product support questions, please use communities relevant to that product for best results. Specific issues that follow rule 6 are allowed.

2. 2

   No memes, screenshots, and jokes

   Do not post memes, screenshots of bad design, or jokes. Check out /r/ProgrammerHumor/ for this type of content.

3. 3

   No self-promotion

   Read and follow reddiquette; no excessive self-promotion. Please refer to the Reddit 9:1 rule when considering posting self promoting materials.

4. 4

   No commercial promotions/solicitations

   We do not allow any commercial promotion or solicitation. Violations can result in a ban.

5. 5

   No soliciting feedback not on Saturday

   Sharing your project, portfolio, or any other content that you want to either show off or request feedback on is limited to Showoff Saturday. If you post such content on any other day, it will be removed.

6. 6

   Assistance Questions Guidelines

   If you are asking for assistance on a problem, you are required to provide * Context of the problem * Research you have completed prior to requesting assistance * Problem you are attempting to solve with high specificity Questions in violation of this rule will be removed or locked.

7. 7

   Career/Getting Started Questions

   Open-ended/general "how do I get started in web dev" and general Career related posts are only allowed within the pinned monthly career thread. The answer to many of these questions can also be found in the sub FAQ, or in /r/learnprogramming/ and /r/cscareerquestions/. Highly specific career/getting started assistance questions are allowed so long as they follow the required assistance post guidelines.

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/webdev has 3.3 million members and about 100 posts a day, and the moderators remove most of them. In our sample only about 31% of posts stayed up. That is the first thing to understand: this is a big subreddit run like a small one, with tight rules about what belongs in the feed and when.

Six days a week the feed is discussion and questions: why developers still disagree about how to write CSS, whether a newer JavaScript runtime is safe for production, how an employed developer gets a first freelance client. Comment sections on these are opinionated and technical, around 20 words a comment, and people argue the point hard. On Saturday the feed changes completely. Showoff Saturday is the one day you can post what you built, and it accounts for nearly half the flaired posts in our sample: games, browser tools, libraries, small apps, usually with a screenshot and a link.

AI is the sore spot. Posts built with coding agents are common on Saturdays and some authors say so up front. The reaction is split, and a moderator removal message in the sample lists LLM generated posts and comments as low effort. Older hands are also openly tired of questions they think a person should work out alone.

What lands

• A Saturday project post that explains how it works: the architecture decision, the hard part, the stack. A browser game that keeps the deck on the server to stop cheating is the kind that gets real replies.
• A discussion on a long-running disagreement, like how CSS should be added to a site. These pull long threads of people defending their approach.
• A specific how-do-I question with what you tried, such as how to run a canvas game loop inside a component framework. It got detailed, patient answers.
• Small projects with a human reason behind them: a puzzle site for a home town, a timer built because the popular ones were too cluttered.
• Open source and free tools with the repository linked, no signup and nothing to buy.

What gets removed or ignored

• Project and feedback posts on any day but Saturday. Showoff Saturday flaired posts are also the largest group of mod removals in the sample, so the flair alone does not protect a post.
• Offers to build websites for people, and requests for someone to build one. These are solicitation and are removed every time.
• Posts from accounts under three months old or without comment karma. AutoModerator removes them and tells the author to go and comment first.
• Title-only posts, vague or easily searchable questions and open-ended prompts, which the mods remove as low effort.
• Posts whose title is just a product name or a domain, and anything that reads as written by an LLM.

The unwritten rules

• Write the post in your own words. Readers here spot generated text quickly, and the mods treat it as low effort.
• On Saturday, lead with how you built it, not what it does for the user. Marketing copy, emoji feature lists and revenue claims get a cold response from developers.
• If AI wrote most of the code, say so. Authors who disclose it get critique. Authors who hide it get called out.
• Expect blunt replies, including the occasional rant from someone who learned from library books. Nobody softens a disagreement here.
• Links in comments are rare, under 5% of comments carry one. A comment that works a product name into an unrelated answer stands out.

Self-promotion

There are two rules. One says no excessive self-promotion and points to Reddit's 9:1 guideline. The other says no commercial promotion or solicitation at all, with a ban as the penalty. A third rule fences everything else in: showing your project or asking for feedback is limited to Showoff Saturday. In practice that Saturday thread is the only door, and it is still policed. Free, open source or hobby projects explained as engineering stay up more often. Paid products, service offers and anything posted midweek are removed, and moderators paste the self-promotion rule as the reason.

How people write here

Typical post length

144 words

Typical title length

11 words

Titles phrased as a question

26%

Typical comment length

20 words

Comments that include a link

5%

Posts that carry a flair

71%

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/webdev.

• showoff saturday 23 posts
• web 52 posts
• browser 34 posts
• react 25 posts
• github 27 posts
• css 16 posts
• frontend 16 posts
• website 38 posts
• developer 24 posts
• site 29 posts
• project 35 posts
• api 26 posts
• tailwind 9 posts
• html 13 posts
• feedback 35 posts
• cloudflare 12 posts
• components 12 posts
• app 38 posts
• interactive 11 posts
• code 34 posts
• typescript 9 posts
• coding 20 posts
• next.js 10 posts
• design 21 posts
• typescript-native frontend 4 posts
• palette 7 posts
• backend 14 posts
• client-side 7 posts
• pwa 6 posts
• stack 18 posts
• vite 6 posts
• portfolio 12 posts
• developers 13 posts
• json 10 posts
• page 22 posts
• javascript 8 posts
• dev 13 posts
• component 8 posts
• devs 9 posts
• canvas 7 posts

Recurring topics: ui, web, dev, built a, ai, browser, built, site, feedback, website.

Growth

1. 201229k
2. 201351k
3. 201477k
4. 2015103k
5. 2016134k
6. 2017184k
7. 2018282k
8. 2019413k
9. 2020655k
10. 20211M
11. 20231.9M
12. 20242.8M
13. 20253.2M
14. 20263.3M

Related subreddits

• r/Python
• r/golang
• r/Development
• r/webdevelopment
• r/indiehackers
• r/AI_Agents
• r/reactjs
• r/developers
• r/SoftwareEngineering
• r/learnrust

Common questions