What That ‘Account Must Be 10 Days Old With 100 Positive Karma To Post’ Message Means For Your Kid
Last Tuesday, I was folding my 13-year-old’s grass-stained soccer uniform at the kitchen table when he slammed his axolotl-stickered laptop shut hard enough to make his half-eaten strawberry pop-tart rattle on the counter. “Stupid,” he muttered, leaning over the back of his chair to glare at me. “What’s stupid?” I asked, not looking up from matching his mismatched athletic socks. “I spent two weeks building this castle with a working redstone rollercoaster, I go to post it on the Minecraft fan sub, and it says ‘In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.’ What even is karma? Why do they care how old my account is?”
I’d seen the same line a hundred times as a moderator for our local elementary parent-teacher Facebook group, where we have a softer version of the same rule to cut down on scam ads for cheap playground equipment and fake vaccine fundraisers. But I’d never had to explain it to a kid who just wanted to show off a thing he’d spent weeks making. He’d made the new account on purpose, too – he’d heard a kid in his tech class got doxxed after a fight on a forum, so he didn’t want to use his old account that had his favorite anime username linked to a handful of school group chats. He was trying to be safe, and now he felt like he was getting punished for it.
I sat down next to him and pulled up the error on his screen. I remembered when I made my first Reddit account back in 2012, I tried to post a question about my leaking washing machine and got the exact same message. I was 27 and I still felt annoyed, like the whole site was a secret club I wasn’t allowed into. I got that frustration completely.
Instead of just telling him to wait it out, I broke it down plain. Those rules aren’t there to shut new people out. They’re there to shut out bots and trolls that make hundreds of new accounts every single day to post scam links, steal art, or start fights. Most bad actors don’t want to wait 10 days, or spend 10 minutes leaving comments people will like, just to hit 100 karma. It’s a low-effort filter that gets rid of 90% of the garbage before it hits the main feed. That’s why almost every big public forum has some version of it.
He said okay, but what am I supposed to do for 10 days? Just sit around? I told him we don’t have to sit around. We can earn that karma slow, no rush. First, I cleared up the biggest misconception he had: he thought karma was some kind of official score that said if he was a “good” person online. No, I told him, it’s just a little number that counts how many people liked your comments or posts. 100 is nothing – that’s 10 people liking 10 comments, it’s not a big test.
Then we came up with a tiny, low-effort routine: every night after he finished his homework, he’d spend 5 minutes on the sub, find three posts from other people that he actually cared about, and leave a specific comment. No generic “cool build” that no one bothers to upvote – if he liked how someone hid their base behind a waterfall, he’d say that. If he had a question about how they pulled off a tricky redstone build, he’d ask that. That’s the kind of comment people notice and like. He thought it was dumb at first, said he didn’t want to “suck up” to get karma. I told him it’s not sucking up – it’s just participating, the same way you’d compliment someone’s drawing if you were sitting next to them in art class.
He stuck to three comments a night. By day seven, he already had 92 karma. By the time his account hit the 10-day mark, he had 127. I told him he could post whenever he wanted.
A lot of parents I talk to write off all these random online rules as unnecessary gatekeeping, and honestly, a lot of them are. But this one stuck with me, because it teaches a quiet lesson that translates offline, too. We don’t usually tell kids this, but every community – online or off – works a little like that. You don’t walk into a new youth soccer team and immediately ask to be starting captain. You show up to practice, pass the ball to other kids, compliment a good shot before you ask everyone to come watch you play. It’s not about being unkind to new people. It’s about keeping the space safe and nice for everyone who’s already there.
I also had to talk him out of buying karma from one of those sketchy sites he found that sells pre-aged accounts with high karma. I told him even if it worked, it skips the whole point of joining the community, and it’s against the site’s rules anyway. If he got caught, he’d lose the account and all the work he put in anyway. That’s the one hard line I’d tell any parent to take here: workarounds that break the rule don’t help anyone, including your kid, when they’re the one scrolling the feed and dealing with spam later.
He posted his castle last Saturday. It only got 14 upvotes, which was a little disappointing for him at first, but one guy left a long comment asking how he set up the rollercoaster brakes, and they chatted for almost an hour swapping redstone tips. Now he comments on three or four posts a night anyway, even though he doesn’t need any more karma to post.
I still think some community rules are unnecessarily harsh, and I worry that kids who don’t have 10 extra minutes a day to comment, or who are too shy to talk to strangers online, get locked out of spaces they’d belong in. This isn’t a perfect rule. But it’s not just random nonsense, either. Right now, it’s working for us. My kid’s already planning his next build, and he just complained about the same message popping up when he joined a new Genshin Impact fan forum earlier this week. We’ll do the same 5-minute-a-night routine there, too. It’s not hard, once you know what the rule is actually for.
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