What is Reddit karma?

Reddit karma is a running score of how much other people have upvoted your posts and comments. That's the whole idea. But the score quietly decides more than most people realize — including whether your posts show up at all.

Here's how karma actually works, how to earn it without gaming anything, and the part that matters most if you're posting to grow something: the karma gates that remove your post before anyone sees it.

The two kinds of karma

Your profile shows one number, but it's made of two:

• Post karma — from upvotes on your submissions (links, images, text posts).
• Comment karma — from upvotes on your comments. For most people this grows faster, because you can comment far more often than you post.

Some subreddits check them separately. A community might let you comment freely but require post or combined karma before you can submit a link — which is why an account can feel "fine" and still get a submission removed.

Karma is not one-to-one with upvotes

Ten upvotes doesn't always mean ten karma. Reddit dampens the math to blunt vote manipulation, so highly upvoted posts give less than a straight count, and the exact formula isn't public. Treat karma as a rough reputation signal, not a scoreboard.

Why karma matters (the part nobody tells you)

The friendly explanation is "karma is internet points." The useful explanation is this: low karma gets you filtered.

Two things happen below a certain trust level:

• Subreddit karma gates. Thousands of communities use AutoMod to auto-remove posts from accounts under a karma or account-age threshold. r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, and most large subs do this. The rule is rarely posted in plain sight — your post just disappears.
• Reddit's site-wide spam filter.New or low-karma accounts, especially ones posting links, get held back by Reddit's own filters before a human mod ever looks.

Either way the result is the same: no error, no notification, no post in the feed. That's the "silent removal" that makes people think their account is broken.

How to earn karma the honest way

Skip the buy-karma schemes. The accounts get banned and the karma doesn't fix the trust problem. What works is boring and reliable:

• Comment where conversations are already happening — answer a real question in an active thread instead of posting into a dead one.
• Start in welcoming communities (r/AskReddit, hobby subs, your niche) before you post anywhere strict.
• Post things people actually want: a genuinely useful answer, a specific story, a real result. Titles do most of the work.
• Give it a couple of weeks. Account age counts alongside karma, and you can't rush age.

Karma and removals: the connection

If you're posting to promote a project, karma is often the wall you hit first. You write a good post, submit it to a relevant subreddit, and it vanishes — not because it was bad, but because your account sat one point under that community's gate.

That's the exact problem WillItStaywas built for. It reads a subreddit's karma and account-age gates, checks your draft against them, and tells you whether it'll survive before you hit post. If a gate would remove it, you find out with the draft still in your hands.

Frequently asked questions