What Is Reddit Karma?
A score the platform shows you and almost never uses, spent instead by thousands of communities that each set their own price.
Karma is a running score on your Reddit profile, built from the votes other users cast on the things you post and the comments you leave. Upvotes raise it, downvotes lower it, and the total sits publicly on your profile.
What surprises people is what it is for. Reddit itself barely uses it. There is no feature you unlock by reaching a company-set number, no rank, no payout, no privilege the platform grants. The score is spent somewhere else entirely: by individual subreddits, each of which decides for itself what karma you need before it will accept a post or a comment. That is why the same account can be welcome in one community and silently rejected by another on the same afternoon.
There is also not one karma. Your profile keeps separate counters for post karma and comment karma, and other kinds accumulate from particular places on the site. What most people look at is a combined display, which is the problem, because the thing checking you at the door is often not looking at the combined number.
A subreddit's automated rules are written by its moderators, and they can require post karma specifically, or comment karma specifically, or an account older than some age, or any combination. So an account with a healthy-looking total can be blocked by a community that wanted the other kind. Nothing tells you this. The usual experience is a post that appears to publish and then is not there when you check, because the automated rule removed it and the removal is not announced to you.
So the honest description is: karma is a reputation number that thousands of independent communities read according to their own rules, displayed to you as a single figure that hides which rule you failed.
How karma is earned
From votes, and only from votes. Someone upvotes your comment, your comment karma goes up. Someone downvotes your post, your post karma goes down. The count is not a straight tally of vote totals — Reddit applies its own dampening, so a comment with a large score does not translate into that many points — but the direction is exactly what it looks like.
What does not earn karma: posting frequently, being on the site a long time, having a complete profile, or joining communities. Time on the platform is tracked separately as account age, and account age is a second thing subreddits check independently of karma. The two are often required together, which is why a new account cannot simply write a lot of good comments in one evening and be finished.
What subreddits do with it
They gate on it. A community that has dealt with spam, brigading or low-effort posts sets an automated rule that removes submissions from accounts below a threshold, and the threshold is theirs to pick. Some publish it in the sidebar or the rules page. Many do not.
The removal is usually silent from your side. Your post exists on your profile, so it looks published, but it never entered the community's feed. This is the single most common reason someone arrives at this question: they posted, nothing happened, and the absence of any error message made it look like the post simply got no attention.
The check for this is to open the subreddit in a logged-out browser and look for your post. If it is on your profile and not in the community, it was filtered, and the fix is either the karma threshold or the account age one.
Post karma and comment karma are not interchangeable
This is where the combined display does real damage. A rule that requires comment karma is not satisfied by post karma, and the reverse is equally true. Your profile shows a total that may be almost entirely one kind.
The two are also earned in very different ways. Comment karma comes from participating in conversations that already have an audience, so it accumulates steadily in active communities. Post karma requires you to have posted something that itself attracted an audience, which is a harder and much more variable thing. An account that has been usefully commenting for months can be very low on post karma and be blocked by a community that gates on it.
If you are being filtered, check both numbers separately on your profile rather than reading the headline figure.
Can karma go negative, and does it matter?
Yes, it can go below zero, and yes, it matters more than the equivalent positive number does. Negative karma is read as a signal about behaviour rather than as a low score, and automated rules in many communities treat it as a straightforward block.
It is also slow to repair, because the only mechanism is more votes in the other direction, and an account already being filtered has fewer places to earn them. The way out is participating in large, permissive communities where the threshold is low or absent, which is also the standard advice for a brand-new account with no karma at all. The two situations are different in origin and identical in what you do about them.
What karma is not
It is not money, and Reddit does not convert it into anything. It is not a rank or a badge. It does not affect how your posts are sorted for other users — that is done by the votes on the post itself, not by your profile total. It does not give you moderator powers, extra votes, or visibility.
It is also not a measure of whether you are right. Karma measures agreement inside whichever community you were in, which is a different quantity and sometimes an opposite one. This is worth saying because people treat a downvoted comment as a correction, and a heavily upvoted one as a verification, and the score is not evidence of either. It records how a particular room reacted.
Why the number gets bought
Because it is a gate, and gates are the kind of problem that a number solves. Someone wants to post in a community that requires a threshold, their account is below it, and earning the difference honestly means weeks of participating somewhere they did not want to be.
What is worth knowing before treating that as a shortcut: the gate is often two conditions, not one, and account age is the other. Karma arriving on a new account does not make the account old, so a community checking both is not satisfied. And subreddits that gate aggressively tend to have moderators who look at profiles, where a spike with no comment history behind it is visible. The number moves; whether the specific door opens depends on what that door is actually checking, and only the subreddit knows that.
Questions people ask about Reddit karma
What does karma do on Reddit?
Almost nothing at the platform level. Reddit does not unlock features based on it. Individual subreddits use it as an entry requirement, each setting its own threshold in their automated rules.
Is there more than one kind of karma?
Yes. Post karma and comment karma are tracked separately, and your profile can show a combined figure. A subreddit rule can require one specifically, so a healthy total does not guarantee you pass.
How do I know if a subreddit blocked my post for low karma?
Open the subreddit while logged out and look for your post. If it appears on your profile but not in the community, it was filtered automatically. The removal is not usually announced to you.
Can Reddit karma go negative?
Yes, and many automated rules treat a negative total as a block outright. Recovering is slow because the only mechanism is earning votes, and a filtered account has fewer places to earn them.
Does karma make my posts rank higher?
No. Sorting is driven by the votes on that post, not by your profile score. Your karma total does not give your submissions any advantage in a feed.
Is karma worth money?
Reddit does not convert it into anything. Its only practical value is clearing subreddit entry requirements, which is why the number matters to people who want to post somewhere specific.
Keep reading
- add upvotes to a Reddit post — Votes are what the score is made of, and you can add upvotes to a Reddit post from the outside, on a submission that is already public.
- how to build Reddit karma — If what you need is the practical route rather than the definition, how to build Reddit karma covers where it accumulates fastest and why new accounts stall.