Why Can’t My Teen Post to That Online Support Group? Understanding the 10 Day 100 Karma Rule
Last Tuesday, I pulled a pan of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven just as my 14-year-old Lila leaned against the kitchen counter, phone held so tight her knuckles were white. The timer was still beeping, but she didn’t reach for a cookie like she usually does—she just held up the screen to me, and I squinted to read the bright white text on the dark background: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
“What even is karma?” she said, her voice tight. “Why won’t they let me ask for help?”
I wiped flour off my jeans and sat down next to her at the table. Lila had been spiraling for a week after her best friend since third grade started hanging out with a different group and stopped answering her texts. She’d turned down my offer to make an appointment with her school counselor, said she didn’t want to talk to anyone who knew us, didn’t want it getting back to the school. She’d found a subreddit for teen girls dealing with friendship breakups, made a brand new account that afternoon to post her question, because she didn’t want anyone she knows connecting the post to her old art account.
I’d gotten that same error message once, back when I joined a postpartum anxiety group 14 years ago, I just forgot. I’d waited out the 10 days, commented on a handful of baby photos, got the karma I needed, and never thought twice about the rule. But for a 14-year-old who’s crying after school every day, 10 days isn’t just a waiting period—it’s an eternity.
That night, she tried to farm karma on her own. She scrolled through r/cats, commented “so cute” on a dozen posts, got 12 upvotes total after three hours. By the time she came to tell me it wasn’t working, her eyes were red. “It’s stupid,” she said. “I have to be funny or nice on random posts just to get permission to say I’m sad?”
She wasn’t wrong. I get why the rule exists, don’t get me wrong. Mods run these groups on their own time, and they need to keep spam, bots, trolls and doxxers out. A lot of bad actors use new accounts to cause harm, and the 10 day 100 karma rule is an easy, automatic filter. I don’t blame mods for using it. But what most adults don’t see is who gets caught in that filter. It’s not the trolls, who know how to work around the rules. It’s the quiet kid who just made an account because they can’t tell anyone in their real life what they’re going through.
I didn’t tell her “just talk to me instead”—I knew she’d already made it clear she didn’t want that right now, and pushing would just make her shut down. Instead, I pulled up my own phone and started looking for workarounds. First, I found that the sub she wanted to post in had a weekly “new account open thread” where people who didn’t meet the karma requirement could post questions anyway, right on the sticky at the top of the page. I showed her, but she said she didn’t want her question buried under a hundred other posts, she wanted people to see it and respond.
Next, I offered to post it anonymously through my account—my account is 12 years old, has way more karma than I’ll ever need, and no one I know follows it anyway. She said no, she wanted to be able to check back and reply to people on her own, without me in the middle. That makes sense, anonymity and control matter a lot when you’re a kid who feels like everything in your life is out of control.
So we did it together. We spent 15 minutes that night getting her karma up the low-effort, natural way. She had a dozen sketches of her cat saved in her camera roll that she hadn’t posted yet, so we put one up on the art sub she was already a member of. We wrote a silly little caption about how he steals socks, and within an hour she had 22 upvotes. She commented on 8 other people’s art posts, pointing out things she actually liked, got another 15 karma from that. We set a reminder on her phone for 10 days out, so she wouldn’t forget why she was building up the count.
That’s the thing I share with other parents now when they run into this issue: don’t just tell your kid they shouldn’t be on those sites. They’re already there, and a lot of the time, those spaces are more helpful than anything we can give them, because they get to talk to people who are actually going through the same thing. If your kid hits this error, first, acknowledge that it’s frustrating—don’t dismiss their feelings. Second, check for the weekly open thread, most big restricted groups have one hidden at the top of the feed. Third, help them build a little karma buffer ahead of time if you can—it takes 15 minutes, and it means if they ever need to post something vulnerable later, they don’t have to wait when they’re hurting. Fourth, don’t push them to use your account or give up their anonymity if they don’t want to.
Ten days later, Lila had 117 karma, and she posted her question. The next morning, she came down to breakfast, smiled, and ate two cookies. She said dozens of girls commented saying they’d gone through the exact same thing, and it made her feel less alone. She still hasn’t wanted to talk about it much with me, and that’s okay.
It’s been three weeks now, and I still think about that automated error message. I know the rule keeps most spaces safe, and I don’t want to see it gone entirely. But it’s easy for the people who set the rules to forget that on the other side of that message is a kid who’s hurting, who’s already worked up the courage to ask for help, just to get turned away for something that doesn’t even have anything to do with their question. We got lucky this time, we had the time and the know-how to work around it. But there are so many kids who don’t. We keep a little karma buffer in Lila’s account now, just in case next time.
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