What Do “10 Days Old” and “100 Positive Karma” Posting Rules Mean for Kids Online? Parent Tips
Last Tuesday, my 12-year-old Jax leaned against the kitchen fridge mid-strawberry pop-tart, crumbs sticking to his hoodie, phone held out like it had bitten him. “It won’t let me post,” he said, frowning. “I spent three weeks building that terrible Star Wars AT-AT that falls apart if you breathe on it too hard, and they won’t let me show anyone.”
I wiped crumbs off the counter and leaned over to look. The error message was plain text, straight to the point: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma. Jax had made the account the night before, just to share his Lego builds with the other teen hobbyists in the Reddit group he’d joined. He’d left one comment on someone else’s MOC (that’s a custom build, for the uninitiated) that got 2 upvotes, so he was 98 karma and 9 days short.
He grumbled that the rule was stupid, that all his friends got to post their stuff right away, that one friend even used his dad’s old account to post and no one said anything. I got it, honestly. I’d run into the same rule back when I was into houseplant trading in college, and I’d thought it was just arbitrary gatekeeping back then too. But sitting there on the kitchen tile with Jax’s half-built AT-AT propped against the cupboard (the front leg had fallen off when he carried it down), I started thinking about what this rule actually teaches kids that most of us don’t talk about.
I sat down next to him on the couch and pulled up the group’s about page to walk through it. I explained karma first, in terms he’d get: it’s not some fancy internet points that make you cool. It’s just the group’s way of tracking whether you’re adding stuff people like. Upvote is a thumbs up, downvote is a thumbs down, add all the thumbs up you get, that’s your positive karma. The 10-day and 100-karma rule is first for blocking bots and spammers who make hundreds of fake accounts to post scam links or bully people. But that’s not the only reason it’s there.
Jax still wanted to post that day. I didn’t offer to let him use my old account, even when he begged. I told him the rule was there for a reason, and we could work with it. What if he spent 10 minutes a day for the next week commenting on other people’s builds, I said, instead of just scrolling and waiting. I told him to leave one specific comment on each post he liked, not just “cool” or “nice build.” If someone posted a lopsided Millennium Falcon, say “I love how you did the blue paint on the engines, mine always comes out streaky” instead of “great job.”
He grumbled, but he did it. By the end of the first three days, he had 82 karma. He’d commented on a 11-year-old’s wobbly Ewok village that kept falling apart, said “my AT-AT does the exact same thing, how do you get the tree trunks to stop slipping?” That got 17 upvotes and three replies from other people who had the same problem. By day 9, he had 101 karma, and we just had to wait one more day for the account to hit the 10-day mark. When he finally hit post, his AT-AT got 34 upvotes, and half a dozen comments from other kids saying their first custom builds fell apart too. Jax was way more excited about that than I’ve seen him get about any grade this semester. He even set up a little shared chat with three other kids who build terrible Lego Star Wars ships together now.
That experience made me start telling other parents about this rule when they complain their kid got locked out of posting. It’s not just a random hoop to jump through. It’s a low-stakes online version of a rule we all learn offline: you don’t join a new community and immediately ask everyone to pay attention to your stuff. You participate first. You comment on other people’s work. You get a feel for how the group talks, what they like, what’s off-limits. That’s a lesson kids don’t learn on TikTok or Instagram, where you can post your first reel day one and get a million views if the algorithm favors you.
I’ve got three concrete small things I tell parents to do when their kid runs into this rule, that don’t take much work. First, if your kid tells you they want to join a specific hobby group to share their work, help them make the account right then, even if they don’t have anything to post yet. That checks the 10-day box without any waiting later. Second, tell them to leave 10 specific comments on other people’s posts, one sentence each that mentions something specific they liked. That almost always gets you to 100 karma in a couple days, way faster than just leaving generic one-word comments. Third, don’t lend them your old account to skip the rule. It breaks most groups’ terms of service, it skips the whole point of learning how to participate, and if they get into any kind of conflict, your personal account is the one that gets tied to it. I know a mom who let her 13-year-old use her account to post art, and when her kid got in an argument with another user, the mom started getting weird DMs from strangers. It’s not worth the shortcut.
Jax still complains when he joins a new group and gets that same error message. Last month he wanted to post a custom Pokemon card he drew, got the notification, and threw his head back onto the couch and groaned like I was making him run a mile. But he already knows the drill now: he opens the feed, scrolls, leaves a few comments, and waits. He told me last week that the best part of the whole thing was meeting those other kids who build bad Lego ships, something that never would have happened if he’d just posted his AT-AT and dipped.
I still worry about Jax being online, same as every other parent. There’s a hundred rules on big platforms that don’t make sense for kids, and a hundred more that don’t keep them safe like they promise. But this one? It’s annoying, it’s inconvenient when you’re 12 and excited to show off your work, but it’s also a small, useful lesson that fits. We’ll see how it goes the next time he wants to post something new.
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