What is karma, and how do I get more of it?
Karma is a reputation system. Reddit as a whole will trust you more if you have more of it. On the most simple level, you get 1 karma point for every upvote you receive, you lose 1 for every downvote, and yes, you can go into negatives. Karma from comments is counted separately from karma from posts. On Old Reddit, they're displayed separately on your profile. On the redesign and on mobile, they're mostly displayed as one combined count, but the separation is still there. It gets more complicated than that, but as a new user, those are the basics that you should start off knowing.† Now, even if someone told you the methods they use to gain karma, it wouldn't necessarily help you, since although that's what they're good at, you might be good at something else. The best ways to get karma are the ways you find for yourself. The basics include this, though: Be committed to using reddit regularly, put effort into the content you make, don't repost in places where the focus is on original content (OC for short), and consistently leave witty but tactful comments wherever you can, especially on new or rising posts in popular subreddits.
Why do some communities require specific amounts of karma to post in them?
To keep trolls, spambots, spammers, and people who don't know what they're talking about out. Like I said, Reddit as a whole will trust you more if you've earned more karma, and for good reason. Reddit prefers regular users who put in the time and effort.
In other words, the purpose of karma thresholds is to limit folks’ ability to start an account or accounts and just spam reddit with whatever they want, throw out links, etc.
The bottom line is this: you have to prove upfront that you’re bringing value to the table before folks let you play ball on their subreddits. 1
"You're doing that too much, try again in X minutes"
Although the best way by far to start building up karma is by commenting a lot, there's an unfortunate obstacle in the way - users who are new to any given subreddit are restricted by a comment cooldown in that subreddit. This means that they can only comment every few minutes. At first glance, this may seem pointless and infuriating, but it actually does serve a purpose.
The reason it's necessary is that it prevents people from creating new accounts to spam comments. You yourself may have no intention of doing that, but it's really impossible to know what every new user is thinking when they join. So far, this is the solution that works best. The way to overcome it is to get a sufficient amount of karma (reportedly, 10) from the subreddit you're trying to use. With some dedication, you'll be able to comment freely before you know it.
If you delete a post or a comment, does whatever karma you got from it disappear as well?
No, your karma will not change if you delete comments or posts. The only way to change how much karma you have is to get upvoted or downvoted on any given post or comment.
What do I need in order to create my own subreddit?
There are two criteria for a Reddit account to be able to create a subreddit:
• Your account must be at least 30 days old.
• Your account must have a minimum (unknown) amount of positive karma. (The amount of karma required is known only to the Reddit admins.) ††
This is to make sure that people spend some time participating on Reddit and getting to know how it works, before making a subreddit of their own. It also prevents spammers from using brand-new accounts to create subreddits for their spam.
If you find yourself unable to create a subreddit, please check the age of your account and your karma. You may need to wait a few weeks, or build up some karma. Acquiring karma is easy - just find some subreddits you enjoy, and participate. Post some comments and create posts in places where you can. In short, become part of the community.
How much karma do you need to post on r/memes?
It's a secret, but this post may contain the answer.
Obviously, this may no longer be relevant, as the karma threshold can be changed at any time.
How much karma do you need to post on [insert subreddit name here]?
If the mods of a subreddit haven't specified the karma requirement upfront, chances are it's a secret. This is to prevent people from going and spamming/begging for karma until they have the amount they know they need. Just participate consistently in other places and you'll have enough karma sooner or later.
Awarder and awardee karma
Award karma is new feature currently in its beta stage, so it's not available to all users. It works quite differently from post and comment karma. Here's a bit on how it works, according to the original admin post that first announced it:
Receiving an award is a signal of recognition from another redditor. Therefore, receiving any award should earn a nominal amount of karma. Further, the recipient should get more karma when the award costs more. These two factors make up the experiment's "awardee karma" calculation.
Award givers encourage others to create great content and they show their acumen when they recognize quality content early. Therefore, the experiment's "awarder karma" calculation depends on 1) the coins used to give the award, and 2) how early the award was given relative to others.
Who has the most karma?
That would be u/Gallowboob.
Footnotes
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† Where does it get more complicated?
Karma is not the total amount of upvotes minus downvotes you've received.
To quote Reddit's CEO u/spez, when asked how karma is calculated, he had this to say:
It starts with one upvote = one karma, but karma is more restricted from an anti-cheating perspective and has ancient restrictions that I'd like to get rid of in time (such as the ~5k limit karma earned per post).
Basically, you can't really earn more than 5,000 karma from a post or comment, even if it reaches that many upvotes or more. That's not to say that you'll get 1 karma point per upvote until your post hits the 5,000 mark - it tends to slow down at around ~1,500 upvotes, so in order to get 5,000 karma from a single post, you might need it to get tens of thousands of upvotes. That's why, in order to amass thousands of karma points, you need to participate regularly on the site, and build up your karma with the upvotes you'll get here and there.
Additionally, the older a post is, the less karma it gives you for the amount of upvotes it gets. The posts and comments that quickly shoot up in popularity are the ones that get the best karma-to-upvote ratio, and not the ones that get more upvotes over time. Posts over a day old likely won't give you karma at all, even if they're upvoted a lot. Here's a very handy diagram that visualizes this.
†† Based on a response we received on this post, this unspecified amount is likely 10 or less karma. 2
Do you have more information or tips that you think should be up here? Let us know! Also, feel free to ask questions or voice your feedback in the comments. I recommend sorting the comments by Q&A, because otherwise you'll have to really dig deep to find anything useful once there starts to be a lot of comments.
