Karma is Reddit's reputation number. Every upvote on your posts and comments adds to it, every downvote subtracts, and the running total sits on your profile split into post karma and comment karma. It cannot be spent, converted, or redeemed for anything. Reddit is explicit that it is a reflection of contribution rather than a currency.
Which makes the obvious question — why does anyone care? — a good one. The answer is that individual subreddits use it as a filter, and that filter is what stands between most new accounts and the communities they actually want to reach.
What karma gates in practice
- Subreddit entry requirements. Many communities set a minimum karma, a minimum account age, or both, and configure automod to remove posts from accounts below the line. The removal is usually silent — your post looks fine to you and is invisible to everyone else.
- Rate limits. New and low-karma accounts are limited in how often they can post and comment sitewide, which is Reddit's spam defence rather than a subreddit rule.
- Credibility with moderators. A moderator reviewing a borderline post looks at the account. A six-year-old account with comment karma across many subreddits reads differently from a two-week-old account whose only activity is links to one domain.
Earning it, if you are here to market
The uncomfortable truth about Reddit as a channel is that the thing that earns karma and the thing that earns customers are the same thing, and neither can be automated: being genuinely useful in a community you understand, repeatedly, before you have anything to sell there.
Reddit is unusually good at detecting the alternative. Accounts that arrive, post a link, and leave get removed by automod, downvoted by members, and eventually banned by moderators — and the domain often gets banned with them, which affects every future post from anyone.
- Comment first. Comment karma is easier to earn than post karma and is what most gates actually check.
- Pick three subreddits, not thirty. Depth in a community you actually read beats breadth across communities you do not.
- Read the rules page of every subreddit before posting. Self-promotion policies vary enormously and are enforced strictly.
- Never buy an aged account. Moderators check post histories, and a mismatch between an account's history and its current behaviour is the most obvious signal there is.