What I Learned When My 13-Year-Old Couldn’t Post In Her Favorite Online Hobby Group
The sigh that came from the kitchen counter last month was the kind that only a 13-year-old can pull off—deep, dramatic, heavy enough to rattle the half-eaten bowl of goldfish crackers next to Lila’s phone. I looked up from folding laundry and raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong now?” She turned the phone toward me, the screen glowing with a bright red error message that’s become pretty common across online hobby groups: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
“This is so dumb,” she said, stabbing a cracker with her finger. “I just want to sign up for the mushroom keychain swap. They think I’m a bot or something?”
I walked over to look. She’d made the account the day before, after begging for a month to join this swap—she’d spent the last six weeks perfecting 10 tiny crocheted mushrooms in different pastels, and was dying to trade one for a handmade plush from another teen crocheter across the country. I’d helped her set the account up, walked through the rules about not sharing her last name or address, checked the group’s privacy settings, and thought we were done. I’d seen that 10-day/100-karma rule a hundred times on different groups, and never given it a second thought until it was blocking my kid’s big plan.
She immediately asked if she could use my old Reddit account, which has thousands of karma from years of posting about books and gardening. For half a second, I almost said yes. It would have made the sigh go away, solved the problem right then. But I remembered back when I was in college, I modded a used textbook swap group on campus, and I helped write that exact rule. Back then, we got three or four new scammers a week, creating fresh accounts to post fake listings for expensive textbooks, collect payment from freshmen, and disappear. That rule wasn’t made to annoy new people. It was made to keep people from getting hurt.
I sat down next to her and explained that. She still thought it was unfair. “I’m not a scammer,” she said. “Why should I have to prove that just to post one thing?” I didn’t argue with her. I just said, “Okay, what do you have to lose by playing by their rules? Let’s see what it takes to get that karma.”
100 positive karma sounded like a lot to her, but I pointed out that most people upvote comments that are just nice. If you look at someone’s project and say something genuine, people usually upvote it. She thought that was “sucking up” to get points, but I told her it’s just how communities work. If you joined the crochet club at school, you wouldn’t walk in the first day and ask everyone to give you their handmade stuff, would you? You’d talk about what you make, compliment other people’s work, hang out a little first. This is just the online version of that.
She grumbled, but pulled her phone back and started scrolling. For the next 10 days, she spent 10 minutes every afternoon after homework scrolling the group feed, commenting on posts. She’d point out pretty yarn choices, ask questions about pattern sizes, say she loved the way someone fixed a wonky stitch. Halfway through, she even found a gradient blanket pattern she’d been hunting for months from a post she stopped to comment on, so it wasn’t all a chore. By day nine, she was at 87 karma. The swap sign-ups closed the next day, and she was stressing, checking her phone every 10 minutes after school. I told her she could just wait for the next swap if she didn’t make it, but she said she’d put in all this work, she wanted this one. She commented on three more posts that night, and when she woke up the next morning, her karma was at 102. 10 days had passed, too. She screamed so loud the dog ran under the couch, and posted her swap listing two minutes later.
That’s when I realized how little we talk about this part of digital parenting. We spend all this time warning our kids about predators and scams and screen time limits, but we almost never talk about the small, annoying rules that exist to keep online communities safe, and what it means to be a good member of those communities. I’ve had so many other parents tell me their kids run into this same rule all the time—on gaming groups, art swap pages, fan forums. Most of the time, parents either help their kids cheat it, or tell the kid it’s not worth the hassle and to move on. But that skips the whole lesson.
Now that we’ve gone through this, I have three small things I do any time Lila hits one of these rules, and it’s worked pretty well. First, I never help her cheat. Using an older account with existing karma skips the whole process of showing up, so we just don’t do that. Second, I always explain why the rule exists, not just “it’s the rule.” I pull up old examples of scammers if I need to, so it doesn’t feel like a random group of adults just being mean for no reason. Third, I help her break the requirement into tiny daily steps. 100 karma isn’t a big, scary goal when it’s just 10 genuine comments over 10 days. It’s way less overwhelming that way.
A couple weeks after the swap, Lila got her package: a tiny crocheted fox with a little orange scarf, that now sits on her backpack. She still talks about how that rule was dumb, and just last week she got blocked from posting in a new art zine exchange group that requires 30 days and 200 karma. She rolled her eyes, sighed her dramatic 13-year-old sigh, pulled up the group feed, and started commenting. It’s not perfect. She still complains sometimes, and I still have to remind her that groups get to make their own rules to keep everyone safe. But she’s learning that good things online, just like offline, take a little patience and showing up before you get to the part you want.
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