What I Learned When My 13-Year-Old Hit Reddit’s New User Posting Rule
It’s 7:15 on a Tuesday, and my 13-year-old Lila is slouched over the kitchen table, half a bowl of cheese crackers going stale next to her new drawing tablet. She huffs so loud I look up from folding her grass-stained soccer practice uniforms, and turns her phone toward me. The screen glows with a bright red error message: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
Lila had been planning this post for weeks. She saved three weeks of allowance to buy the refurbished tablet, spent every weekend for a month working on this drawing of a dragon nested in an old bookstore—her favorite combination of two things she loves. She’d found the r/TeenArt share subreddit from a friend at school, and couldn’t wait to post it where other people who loved that kind of art would see it. She’d made the account two days earlier, just enough time to follow a dozen artists and comment once on a wolf drawing she adored.
“Why do they hate me?” she said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” That’s when I realized she wasn’t just annoyed at a finicky website rule. She’d internalized the block as personal rejection. I’m on Reddit for houseplant tips and bad cooking memes, so I knew the rule was just anti-spam, but she had no frame of reference for that. I almost just brushed it off and said “just wait a week and you’ll be fine,” but that would have left her thinking it was her fault for being new.
I pulled a chair next to her, pointed to the words on the screen, and said, “This isn’t about you. This rule is here to stop people who make fake accounts to send spam for weird products or bully people, not to stop your dragon drawing. It’s just a blanket rule that hits everyone new, not just you.” We counted the days together: 8 more days until her account was old enough. Then we checked her karma: she had 1, from that comment on the wolf drawing. 99 more to go.
I could have texted my husband, my sister, and half my mom group to upvote a random comment of hers to hit the number quick. A lot of parents I know do that, just to get their kid what they want right away and avoid the fuss. But I remembered when I made a new account a couple years ago, I got my first 100 karma just by commenting on other people’s plants, saying I loved how their pothos looked just like mine, that sort of thing. So I suggested we try that instead: every night after homework, spend 10 minutes on the sub, comment on three pieces you actually like, and say one specific thing you like about them.
She rolled her eyes at first, said that was dumb, why should she have to do work just to post her own art. I said, “Think of it like when you joined the new art class at the rec center last fall. You didn’t walk in and immediately set up your easel and ask everyone to look at your work. You said hi to the other people drawing, looked at what they were working on first. This is just the online version of that.”
So she did it. The first night, she commented on a drawing of a cat wearing a witch hat that she loved, said “I love how the stripes on the hat look woven, that must have taken forever” and got two upvotes. The next night, she commented on three more, got another 12. By the fifth day, she had 107 karma. She was surprised that so many people replied to her. One girl even said thanks and asked what kind of brushes Lila used for her own line art. Lila started looking forward to that 10 minutes every night, more than she was looking forward to posting her own drawing, honestly.
When the 10 days were up, she posted her dragon. She got 72 upvotes, and 11 comments, most of them from people she’d already talked to. One girl asked her to do a quick tutorial for the dragon’s translucent wings, which Lila was over the moon about.
I’ve thought about this a lot since then, because so many of the conversations we have about kids and social media focus on screen time limits or online safety, not the small unplanned lessons that pop up from random website rules. A lot of people see these 10 day/100 karma rules as an annoying hassle, and they just bypass them any way they can. But what we lose when we do that is a chance to teach two small, really useful things without a big awkward lecture.
First, it teaches kids that not every delay is personal rejection. So many kids grow up thinking if they don’t get to post or get likes immediately, it means their work isn’t good enough. Walking through this rule together lets you point out that systems have rules that apply to everyone, and it doesn’t say anything about you. The specific thing I tell other parents now is, when your kid shows you this error, don’t just brush it off. Stop for two minutes, read the rule together, and explicitly separate it from their work: “This is for stopping spam, not stopping you.” That takes two minutes, and it stops them from spiraling into thinking they did something wrong before they even get started.
Second, it’s a low-stakes way to teach that you participate in a community before you ask for attention for your own stuff. Instead of hitting 100 karma with 100 upvotes from your aunt, getting it by commenting on other people’s work means your kid actually interacts with the community, not just uses it as a place to show off their work. The concrete thing you can do is just tell them to leave 2-3 specific comments a day, 10 minutes max. It doesn’t require any extra work from you, and it works almost every time.
It’s not a perfect system, of course. Last month Lila joined a new fan art sub that required 1000 karma to post, and she huffed about that for an hour. But now she just shrugs after a bit, pulls up the feed, and starts commenting on other people’s art. I don’t know if this small lesson will stick with her forever, or if it’ll make her a better digital citizen or anything like that. It’s just one small moment, a random error message that turned into something useful, when I was expecting just another 10 minutes of solving teen tech problems. Some days, that’s all the good parenting you get, right?
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