On Reddit, an average comment posted early beats a great comment posted late. Not sometimes. Almost always. If you only fix one thing about how you use Reddit, fix your timing.
Why the first hour decides the thread
Reddit sorts by momentum, not just score. Early votes count for more, and the comments that get a few upvotes in the first hour float to the top, where everyone else sees them and votes them higher. It compounds. By the time a thread is a day old, the order is basically locked. Show up then and you're commenting into an empty room.
The same is true for the post itself. A reply on a thread that's still climbing rides that wave. A reply on a thread that already peaked goes nowhere, no matter how good it is.
Being first to a good thread is worth more than being clever on a dead one.
"Early" means something different in every sub
In a fast sub like r/SaaS, the first hour can mean the first ten minutes. In a slower niche community, you might have most of a day. The trick is knowing the pace of the rooms you care about, so you're not too late in the fast ones or refreshing pointlessly in the slow ones.
What to do in that first hour
How to be early without living on Reddit
The honest problem with the first-hour rule is that nobody can sit and refresh a dozen subreddits all day. So you either get lucky, or you miss the window. That's exactly the gap Karmy fills: it watches your subreddits and pings you the moment a fresh, on-topic thread appears, so you can be there in the first hour instead of finding it on day three.