What to do when your kid can’t post: understanding new user age and karma rules for online communities
Last Tuesday, my 13-year-old Jax slid his Chromebook across the kitchen island mid-afternoon goldfish snack, crumbs tumbling off the edge onto the granite. “Can you help me?” he said, jaw tight. “I need to post this question on the Lego robotics subreddit, but it won’t let me.” I leaned in, and there it was, plain as day on the screen: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
Jax had spent two months after school building a custom competition robot for the state middle school STEM fair next weekend. His tech ed teacher was out sick all week with a broken wrist, and none of the YouTube tutorials covered the wonky third-party motor he’d salvaged from an old 3D printer. A friend from his robotics club had recommended the sub, so Jax made an account the night before, when he got stuck and couldn’t move forward. He had no idea he’d hit a wall before he even got to ask his question.
When I asked if he knew what karma meant, he shrugged. “It’s like likes, right? But I don’t have anything to post to get likes. I just joined to ask for help.” My first instinct was exactly what most parents would do: grab the laptop, pull up my own 12-year-old Reddit account (the one I made for backyard chicken coop plans back in 2011, that’s just been sitting around ever since) and post the question for him. It would have taken two minutes, he would have gotten his answer, and we could have gone back to dinner prep. But before I typed in my password, I stopped.
I’d spent the last year helping Jax learn how to navigate public online communities on his own, and this weird, annoying rule wasn’t just a roadblock. It was a chance to talk about why these rules exist, something most kids (and a lot of adults) never really stop to think about.
I sat down next to him and explained that the rule isn’t there just to be mean. Most big hobby or support communities get flooded every day with spam accounts that sell counterfeit parts, or trolls that make new accounts to harass people after they get banned from the old one. By requiring new accounts to wait 10 days and earn 100 positive karma, the people who run the community cut out almost all of that bad stuff before it ever hits the main feed. It keeps the space helpful for people who actually want to stick around and participate.
Jax groaned when I said that meant he’d have to wait at least 10 days to post on his own. “That’s cutting it so close,” he said. “What if I don’t get karma in time?” I agreed that if we hit a wall at the end, I could post the question from my account. But first, we could try it his way, and learn how to earn karma the right way. I walked him through a couple of simple, specific things that don’t count as spamming: first, go through the sub and find posts that actually interest him, and leave genuine comments. If he likes someone’s build, say that. If he has a small question about it, ask that. Second, share something of his own that’s not his big, urgent question. The “share your build fails” thread was pinned at the top, so that was a perfect place to start.
Jax did exactly that. He found three other people who’d built similar competition robots, left comments saying he loved how they’d solved the weight distribution problem on their arm, that he was working on something similar and might steal their idea. Then he pulled up the photo of his first prototype, the one that collapsed halfway through a test run and cracked the base plate, and posted it to the build fails thread with a one-line caption: “Learned the hard way that hot glue doesn’t hold 2 pounds of motor weight.”
By that night, he had 23 upvotes. I showed him that karma is just other people saying your comment or post added something to the community, that it wasn’t a score of how good a person you are. By the ninth day after he made his account, he had 98 karma. He checked the feed every morning before breakfast, and was hovering around the laptop when the clock hit midnight on the 10th day. A minute later, he whooped: he’d gotten two more upvotes on his build fail comment, hit 100, and posted his question.
Within three hours, four different people had responded, one of them even shared a free 3D printed CAD file for the exact motor mount he needed. It fit perfectly, and he finished the build three days ago.
What stuck with me isn’t that he got the help he needed. It’s that the rule that felt so arbitrary and frustrating ended up teaching him something I couldn’t have drilled into him with a digital literacy worksheet. A lot of online spaces work because everyone puts a little in before they take something out. It’s not just about asking for help when you need it—it’s about contributing to the space that helps you.
I don’t have a neat big takeaway, or a perfect solution for every time this happens. If your kid needs to ask an urgent question about a mental health issue or bullying two days after making an account, of course you use your account to help them. But for low-stakes, hobby-related problems like this, you don’t have to jump in and fix it right away. Next time your kid hits that 10-day 100-karma rule, try walking them through finding three posts they care about to comment on, and sharing one small thing of their own first. It takes 15 minutes, and it’s way more useful than just doing it for them.
Jax is heading to the competition this weekend, and we have no idea how he’ll place. Last night, I saw him leave a comment for a 12-year-old kid who asked a beginner question about motor sizes, walking them through the same mistake he made with hot glue. He hasn’t asked me to post anything for him since.
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