Unable to access user's web dir

Hello everybody, here comes a total rookie. I just set up a new user in WHM (with the domain to be used later, which is not linked yet). I opened the user in cPanel and added a placeholder site, which is correctly found in the user's public_html. However, when I try to access /~, I end up in getting a 404. What am I doing wrong here? Thanks a lot, Tassilo