What to do when your kid can’t post on Reddit: understanding karma and new account rules for parents
I was scrubbing burnt pasta off a pot last Tuesday when my 14-year-old leaned against the kitchen fridge, phone clutched in one hand and half-eaten cheese puff in the other, and asked the question I never thought I’d field: “Can I use your Reddit account to post? My account’s too new, it says I need to be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma to post to the study group.”
I’ve had a Reddit account for 10 years, and I only use it to look up tomato blight treatments and read stories about people’s terrible first jobs. I couldn’t have told you my karma number if you paid me, so I wiped my hands on my jeans and sat down next to him to figure out what was going on.
He explained he’d made the account three days earlier to ask a question about his science final project. He was building a small portable wind turbine to charge his phone on camping trips, and none of the kids in his class were doing anything more complicated than a baking soda volcano. His physics teacher didn’t know the answer to his question about sizing the lithium ion battery, and he’d watched every YouTube video on the topic twice, so he turned to the r/HighSchoolEngineering sub.
That’s where he hit the rule. The sub’s auto-mod kicked his draft post back immediately with that line: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma. He had 3 days and 12 upvotes. He was stuck, and his deadline was a week out, so waiting seven more days for his account to age would make him miss the turn-in date.
My first instinct was to just hand over my password. I don’t post anything controversial, my account is old enough and has more than enough karma. But I paused, because a few months earlier he’d refused to ask his teacher for help on a homework problem because he was scared she’d think he was behind the rest of the class. This was the first time he’d gone out of his way to find an answer on his own, and I didn’t want to just solve it for him.
We pulled up the sub’s rules side by side on our phones, and it turned out the 10-day/100-karma rule isn’t just a random hoop to jump through. It’s a moderation tool most big community forums use to keep spam, bots, and people making throwaway accounts to harass others out of the space. I explained that to him, and he got it immediately — he hates it when his gaming servers are full of spam accounts too. The rule made sense, it just messed up his timeline.
We brainstormed options. Waiting would make him late, using my account felt like cheating the system the community had set up to keep it useful. So we tried one thing: spend 20 minutes that night leaving real, honest comments on other people’s posts in the same sub. No spamming “nice post!” over and over, just actual comments that contributed something.
He found a post from another kid asking for help with wiring their turbine, and wrote out what had happened when he tried the same method the kid was asking about, and what ended up working for him. He commented on a photo of a finished turbine that someone posted, asking where they got their blade STL file because his 3D printed ones kept splitting. He answered a question about free CAD software for beginners that he’d used all semester for his project. By the time we turned off the phones to watch our weekly baking show, he had 47 upvotes.
Two days later, his account hit the 10-day mark, and he had 121 positive karma. He posted his question that night, and by morning he had 19 answers from people who’d actually built the same kind of turbine, one of whom linked a cheap battery pack that fit exactly what he needed. He adjusted his project, turned it in on time, and got a B+ — which he was thrilled with, because most of the A’s went to kids who’d had help from their engineer parents.
A lot of parents I talk to see any Reddit rule like this as a red flag, like their kid is up to something they shouldn’t be. I get that, it’s an unmoderated space a lot of the time, so it’s normal to be cautious. But there are a few concrete things I took away from this that other parents can use if they get the same question my kid asked me.
First, always ask what they want to post before you say yes or no. It’s 30 seconds, and it tells you if it’s a legitimate question for school or a hobby, or something they shouldn’t be messing with. Second, explain what the rule is for, don’t just tell them they can’t post. It’s a good chance to talk about how online communities work, just like offline groups — you can’t just show up and ask for everyone’s time right away, you have to contribute a little first. Third, if they need to post soon, help them leave real comments instead of just giving them your account. It takes 15 to 20 minutes, and they can hit 100 karma really fast if they comment on posts they actually care about. If you do end up letting them use your account, just review the post before it goes live, and turn off notifications for that thread so you don’t get 50 replies all week.
Last week, I was scrolling through my own Reddit feed for tomato tips, and I saw my son’s username pop up on a new post. A 13-year-old kid had just posted asking the same battery question my son had, and my son left a three-paragraph answer linking the same battery pack he used, and added a tip about securing the wires that he figured out the hard way. His comment already had 32 upvotes.
It’s not a perfect system. I still check his phone once a week to make sure he’s not looking at anything he shouldn’t, and there are still plenty of bad parts of Reddit that we talk about regularly. But this little hoop he had to jump through ended up teaching him more than just how to post a question. It taught him that if you want help from a community, you have to give a little first, even online. I still don’t know what my exact karma number is, and I don’t really care. But I do know that 10 days and 100 upvotes ended up being a better lesson than any lecture I could have given about being part of a group.
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