How to get Reddit karma quickly

A quick guide to getting to 50+ karma on Reddit.

What is karma and why do you need it?

Karma is the points that measure people's response to your posts. On Reddit, users can upvote and downvote posts and comments. When you get upvotes, you gain karma. When you get downvotes, you lose karma.

Many subreddits have a minimum karma requirement to post and comment, especially if they're popular subs. This is a way to prevent spammers and trolls. 50 is a fairly common threshold. So when you create a new Reddit account, you may be blocked from posting or commenting on some subs.

It can be especially hard to get started with a Reddit account that you want to use professionally: you likely want to keep it much more focused, and you're more likely to be trying to get active in the more popular subs.

How to gain karma

There are two good ways to gain karma, without making begging posts asking for upvotes, or trying to do anything sneaky with multiple accounts (which usually doesn't work and can even get you banned). Keep in mind that you need to avoid doing things that make your account look fake or spammy. And if you're trying to use Reddit for work, you need a clean and professional post history.

Option 1: Get active in smaller subs

Find subs you're interested in that don't have limits, and get active. For example, if you're interested in JavaScript programming, and the main JavaScript community has a karma threshold, go find smaller related subs. Maybe there are subs for specific tools you use that don't have limits. This is the best way: it allows you to simply start using Reddit. You'll be engaging with the things you're actually interested in, and your karma will climb naturally, without in any way gaming the system.

Option 2: Answer questions in r/NoStupidQuestions

Go to r/NoStupidQuestions, make sure you're sorting by new, and start answering questions. Give genuine useful answers, and you'll pretty quickly gain a few upvotes per answer. Doing this ~20 times should easily get you past 50 karma. Avoid anything that might be a controversial topic, which could lead to downvotes.

Respect Reddit

This post is inspired by my own experience trying to get karma for a professional-focused account. While the karma limits made life a bit harder, I really like that you can't easily just dive into Reddit and start spamming adverts.

The best way to succeed on Reddit long term is as a genuine contributor, making sure you actually give value to the communities you're in. I used a mix of approaches, but did rely heavily on answering posts on r/NoStupidQuestions. However, now that I have enough karma to post freely, I'm spending far more time posting answers (or questions) from a place of genuine interest than I am making work related comments. There's more of me learning about Astro patterns or pointing people to git learning resources than there are of me posting about my employer. And on the rare occasions I do post about work, I make sure it's truly relevant to the discussion.

Have fun!