What to do when your kid can’t post online: a parent’s guide to account age and karma rules
Last Tuesday, my 13-year-old son hovered in the kitchen doorway while I loaded dinner dishes into the dishwasher, phone clutched in one hand. He’d spent the entire weekend gluing, sorting, and re-sorting Lego bricks to build a custom Skyrim outpost, taken 20 edited photos, and written a whole caption explaining how he’d scavenged the gray slope pieces from three old sets. He’d made his Reddit account three days prior specifically to enter the monthly custom build contest, so when he hit “submit” and got the error, he was confused more than anything. “Mom,” he said, leaning the phone toward me, “it says ‘In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.’ What is karma? Did I do something wrong?”
I wiped my wet hands on my flour-stained apron and leaned in to look. The error message was plain, just stating the requirement, no context or explanation. I remembered when I joined a local plant swap group back in 2019, I got that exact same error, and I also thought I’d accidentally violated some hidden rule I didn’t know existed. I’d spent an hour panicking that I’d been flagged for something before I figured out what it actually meant.
We sat down on the living couch, a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie leaving crumbs between us, and scrolled through the subreddit’s old moderator posts to unpack the rule. It’s not about punishing new people, it turns out. It’s a basic spam filter. Bot accounts and scammers make hundreds of new accounts every day to post links for fake products or harmful content, and requiring accounts to be 10 days old with 100 positive engagement weeds out 90% of those bad actors before they get to post. Spammers don’t bother waiting 10 days or commenting on other people’s posts to build up karma. That makes total sense, but it’s crazy that the error message doesn’t just say that up front.
The problem we ran into was the timeline. The contest closes in 8 days. Even if he built up 100 karma in 48 hours, he’d still hit the 10-day account age mark two days after the contest entry window closed. He slouched back against the couch cushion and said all that work was for nothing. I didn’t dismiss his frustration by saying “it’s just a kid’s contest, don’t worry about it” because it mattered a lot to him, and dismissing small things that matter to kids teaches them not to come to you with the big things later. I also didn’t offer to let him use my account to post, because that violates the subreddit’s rules and defeats the whole point of the anti-spam filter that keeps the community good for everyone.
We brainstormed what to do step by step. First, we tackled the karma requirement. I’d heard of people spamming generic “nice!” comments on every new post to farm karma fast, but that usually gets you downvoted because it reads like spam itself. Instead, we found the weekly “Work in Progress Wednesday” thread the mod team pins for new users to share small updates and engage with each other. I told him to pick three builds he actually liked, and write one specific comment for each. Instead of “cool build,” write something like “I love how you did the rocky base with those curved pieces— I’ve been trying to figure out how to make natural-looking rock for my outpost, this helps a lot.” That’s honest, specific, and most people will upvote a genuine comment that adds something to the conversation. By the end of that night, he already had 28 upvotes. Two days later, he crossed 112 positive karma.
We still had the 10-day problem, so I walked him through writing a message to the mod team. I told him not to beg, not to complain about the rule being stupid, just be clear and polite. We drafted it together: “Hi mods, I’m a new user who made my account 3 days ago to share my custom build for this month’s contest. I understand the 10 day/100 karma rule is for spam filtering, and I already got over 100 positive karma by commenting on other people’s builds. I’ll still hit the 10 day mark two days after the contest closes, so I was wondering if you’d be willing to review my post manually to confirm it’s not spam? I’ve attached my build photos here so you can see it’s legitimate.” He sent it, and we didn’t hear anything for 12 hours, so I thought it was a no. Then the next morning after breakfast, he got a reply: one of the mods said it was totally fine, they’d approve his post manually. He got it up that day.
I’ve talked to a lot of other parents who just write off these rules as stupid online nonsense and tell their kids to stop wasting time on those apps. But this wasn’t a waste of time. It was a good, quiet lesson about how communities work. Offline, you don’t join a new 4-H club or a soccer team and immediately ask everyone to vote for your project or come to your game. You show up, you talk to people, you engage with what they’re doing before you ask for their attention for your stuff. That’s exactly what this rule enforces online. It’s not arbitrary, even if it’s badly communicated.
From what we learned, I now share three concrete steps with other parents who run into this same error with their kids. First, always start by explaining the rule is not a personal punishment, it’s a spam filter— most kids think they’ve done something wrong when they see that error, so clearing that up first takes all the sting out. Second, teach them to get karma with genuine, specific comments, not generic spam. Three to five comments a day will get you to 100 in two or three days, no cheating required. Third, if you have a time crunch like a contest or event deadline, a polite, clear message to mods explaining the situation works way more often than you’d think. Most mods are just volunteers who don’t want spam any more than you do, so they’re willing to bend the rule for real new users.
My son ended up getting 12th place in that contest, out of almost 200 entries. He’s still got the outpost sitting on his desk, and he comments on three or four other builds every other day now. He’s got almost 500 karma now, and he’s already planning his entry for next month. The rule still isn’t perfectly communicated, and it’s still frustrating when it catches a real kid instead of a bot. But this time, the frustration turned into something useful. I don’t know that he’ll remember this specific moment a year from now, but I think he gets it now: you have to participate before you share your own work, and asking nicely for help when you’re stuck works more often than not. It’s a small lesson, but it’s one that applies both online and off.
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