If you’re a blogger trying to build an audience in 2025, Reddit probably looks like the promised land. Millions of active users, niche communities for every topic imaginable, and built-in distribution for your ideas. It’s tempting to plant your flag there and call it home.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: building your entire presence on Reddit is like constructing a house on rented land. You’re playing by someone else’s rules, on someone else’s platform, with zero control over your destiny.
The Reddit Trap
Don’t get me wrong—Reddit can be a fantastic place to test ideas, get feedback, and drive some initial traffic. The problem starts when it becomes your *primary* platform. You’re constrained by subreddit rules, at the mercy of moderators, and one algorithm change away from obscurity. Worse, you’re training an audience to consume your content in a format you don’t control.
Every hour you spend building karma and crafting the perfect Reddit post is an hour you’re not spending on something you actually own.
What You Should Be Building Instead
The smartest move right now is to build off-site infrastructure that you control completely:
Your own forum or community.
Platforms like Circle, Discourse, or even a well-configured Discord give you direct relationships with your audience. You set the rules. You own the data. You control the experience.
Paywalled or premium communities.
Once you’ve proven your value, you have the option to monetize through private communities, exclusive content, or membership tiers. Try doing that on Reddit. You can’t capture the value you create when you’re building in someone else’s walled garden.
Your own distribution channel.
Email lists, RSS feeds, your own website—these are assets that travel with you. Reddit can ban you tomorrow. Your email list can’t.The goal isn’t to ignore Reddit entirely. Use it as a marketing channel, not as your foundation. Drive traffic *from* Reddit *to* your owned properties.
The AI Advantage You’re Ignoring
Here’s where most bloggers are missing the boat entirely: we’re living through the biggest productivity revolution in content creation, and too many people are still writing everything by hand like it’s 2015.Generative AI tools have matured to the point where you can produce high-quality content at scale. We’re talking about:
Drafting multiple blog posts per day instead of per week
Creating variations of successful content for different platforms
Generating supporting materials like social posts, email newsletters, and discussion prompts- Researching and outlining complex topics in minutes instead of hoursThe bloggers who learn to use AI effectively right now will have a 10x content output advantage over those who don’t. And when you control your own platform, that volume translates directly into owned audience growth, SEO dominance, and monetization opportunities.You can use AI to populate your forum with thoughtful discussion starters, to create gated content for premium members, to maintain multiple content streams simultaneously. The leverage is insane.
The Strategy
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
1. Build your home base.
Invest in a website, a forum platform, or a community infrastructure that you own. This is your castle.
Use Reddit tactically.
Share content, engage in discussions, provide value—but always with the goal of moving people to your owned platforms.
Embrace AI production.
Learn the tools. Experiment with prompts. Figure out your workflow. The learning curve is real, but so is the payoff.
Create optionality.
By owning your platform, you preserve the ability to monetize later. Free today, paywalled tomorrow if that’s what makes sense.The bloggers who thrive over the next few years won’t be the ones with the most Reddit karma. They’ll be the ones who built audiences they own, on platforms they control, using tools that let them create faster than the competition.
Reddit will still be there. But it should be your megaphone, not your home.
