That 10 Day 100 Karma Rule Cost Me My Rant Last Night
I was sitting cross-legged on my couch last night, half a bowl of cold miso ramen gone congealed on the coffee table, ready to blow off steam. I’d just gotten done doing laundry at the corner spot, and the new owner jacked up the dryer price to $1.50 and cut the run time by 10 minutes. My sweatshirts were still damp when I hauled them all the way home, and I had a whole snarky little post lined up for the local city subreddit: warning everyone that you basically have to pay double to get dry clothes now, joke about him nickel-and-diming everyone who can’t afford a home washer, maybe a dig at the weird new vending machine that only stocks overpriced energy drinks. I typed it all out, hit post, and got that little red error box. ‘In order to post, your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.’
I got the new account a week and a half ago, after my old one accidentally got linked to my work Google account. I’d posted a couple too many unflattering jokes about my boss’s weird obsession with mandatory 8am team walks, and I panicked that HR would somehow find it. So I deleted the old one, made the new one, and forgot all about the rules until last night. My new account was 8 days old. I had 12 karma, mostly from one upvote on a comment I made about liking 90s Disney Channel movies. I was 2 days and 88 karma short.
I did what any desperate person does, right? I started scrolling through new posts, looking for easy stuff to comment on to farm upvotes. Cute cat posts are the lowest hanging fruit, I remembered that from years ago. So I clicked on a dozen cat posts, typed “That’s such a cute kitty!” on each, scrolled to the next. Got three upvotes in five minutes, felt like I was cooking. Then I hit a post: “My sweet Mabel crossed the rainbow bridge today, 16 wonderful years.” I’d already typed “Cute cat!” and hit enter before I read the title. I sat there staring at my screen for a full minute, a ramen crumb falling into my keyboard crack. I couldn’t exactly delete it, that would feel worse. The OP replied “Thank you, she was one of a kind” and I just… left it. I felt terrible. I wasn’t even there to grieve their cat, I was just there stealing an upvote for my stupid dryer rant. Awful.
I get it, honestly. I don’t blame the mods. Last year, that same sub got spammed for three straight weeks with fake weight loss pill ads and crypto scams, all from brand new accounts. Mods are volunteers, they don’t get paid to sit there removing 50 spam posts a day. Rules like this are just an automatic filter to cut down on work. Even my tiny neighborhood community forum has the same kind of rule now, you can’t post for a month after you join. I get the logic. But it still feels weird that it works so much worse on the actual bad guys than it does on me. Spammers don’t make one-off accounts, right? They buy pre-farmed 100 karma accounts for a couple bucks from sketchy sites, or run bots that upvote each other to hit the limit. I’ve seen it. The only people this rule stops are the regular people who just made an account to complain about a dryer, or ask for a plumber when their sink floods at 2am, or warn their block that someone’s been stealing packages off porches.
Today’s my 10th day with the account. I’ve got 47 karma now. I got a bunch of upvotes from agreeing with someone that the traffic light at 5th Street is broken, which I do actually think, so that wasn’t even a lie. But I’m still 53 short of 100. The rage I felt last night about the dryer is mostly gone. I hung my damp sweatshirts up over the shower rod last night, they dried eventually, I wore one today. I can’t even remember the dumb joke I had about the vending machine. It’s not that big of a deal, I guess. But it’s just… weird, right? You have to jump through all these hoops just to say something that doesn’t even matter that much, while the people selling fake stuff just waltz right in. I saw a thread a while back where a new user’s post asking for an emergency plumber got taken down because they didn’t hit the karma limit. By the time their waiting period was up, their kitchen floor was already warped from the standing water. That’s the stuff no one talks about when they defend these rules.
I tried posting a quick question in the mod thread yesterday asking if they could make an exception for local posts from real people, and never heard back. Which is fair, they get a hundred messages a day, I’m not entitled to a reply. I’ve thought about just buying a pre-made account to hit the limit, but that feels wrong, and also I don’t want to give some scammer $5 just to complain about a dryer. That’s way more expensive than just running my dryer twice, honestly.
I might just keep commenting on cat posts for another few days, get my 100 karma, post the rant. I don’t know. Even if I do, how many people will see it? Half the people on the sub already do their laundry somewhere else by now, probably. Or I could just walk down there tomorrow, when I go get coffee, and tell the guy myself. But what do I say? “Your dryers suck, can you change them back?” It feels less scary to yell about it online than it does to say it to his face. That’s the other thing, right? I made the account to have a place to say the stuff that’s too small to say to anyone in real life, and now I can’t even say that. I guess I’ll just sit here, accumulate upvotes, and wait. Maybe by the time I can post, I’ll have something more important to say than a rant about dryers. Or maybe I won’t. It doesn’t really matter either way, I guess.
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