Why your kid can’t post on most online forums: a parent’s guide to karma and account age rules
Last Tuesday, my 12-year-old son leaned against the kitchen counter while I scraped cereal bowls into the trash, his phone held out at arm’s length like he was showing me a dead bug. His custom Lego mech had taken 12 days of after-school work—he’d stayed up until 9:30 three nights in a row modifying the arm joints to hold a giant blaster, and sorted through my old craft bin for clear plastic to make a cockpit canopy. He’d made a new Reddit account the night before to post it to the custom Lego sub he’d been obsessing over for months. When he hit the “post” button, a gray error box popped up: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
He’d read the sub’s rules, he told me, he just skipped over that part because it didn’t make any sense. Why did he need permission to post a Lego picture? Why did he need to wait 10 whole days when he was ready right now? Couldn’t I just post it from my old account, the one I barely used anyway?
I wiped crumbs off my hands and pulled out a chair for him at the table. I’d forgotten that rule even existed, since I joined that sub almost 10 years ago. I’d run into the same requirement when I joined a plant parent forum a couple years back, and I’d been annoyed too even as an adult. It felt like a stupid, arbitrary hoop when all I wanted to do was ask why my pothos was turning yellow.
I didn’t say yes to posting it for him right away, and I didn’t say no. First I said, “That sucks, dude. You worked so hard on that, and it’s totally fair to be annoyed that you can’t share it right now.” Then I pulled up the rule on my own phone and explained it in plain terms: The people who run big public forums don’t add that rule just to be mean. It’s there to catch spam accounts and trolls, people who make a new account just to post scam links or harass people, then throw it away when they get banned. Most of those bad actors don’t stick around 10 days or put in the work to get 100 positive upvotes, so the rule keeps most of that garbage out before it clogs up the feed for everyone else.
He still thought it was dumb, but he got it. He’d dealt with spam comments on his private Minecraft server already, so he knew how annoying that was. The question still stood: what do we do now? I told him I wasn’t going to post it for him this time. This was his hobby, his build, and if he wanted to be part of that community long-term, he needed his own spot there. I also didn’t want to risk my own account getting flagged for breaking unwritten community rules around posting for brand new users.
Instead, we made a plan. It took five minutes a day, max, after he finished his homework. The goal was to get 100 positive karma before the 10-day wait was up, so as soon as the clock ran out, he could post. I told him generic comments like “cool build” almost never get upvoted, because people don’t stop to engage with one-word compliments. Instead, look for posts where you can say something specific. If someone’s build has a cool detail you noticed, name it. If they’re asking for help with a problem you’ve already solved, share what worked for you.
First day, he complained the whole time he was doing it. He left three comments, only one got a single upvote. He slumped back in his chair and said it was never going to work. I told him to just try again tomorrow, it didn’t have to be perfect. The second day, he found a post from another 12-year-old whose mech knee joints kept falling apart—exactly the problem he’d fixed on his own build. He typed out three sentences explaining how he’d added a small rubber washer from an old faucet kit my husband had in the garage, and that it fixed the wiggling. By the end of that night, that comment had 17 upvotes, and the original poster replied to say he was going to try it.
By day eight, he hit 104 positive karma. He spent the last two days re-reading his post description to make sure it was clear, and on the tenth day, he hit post. By the end of the weekend, he had 32 upvotes, and eight people asked him for a part list. He walked around the house for three days grinning about it.
A lot of parents I talk to just post their kid’s stuff for them to avoid the wait, or tell their kid to just pick a different hobby. But this small, annoying rule turned out to be a good, low-stakes lesson that you don’t get to show up to a community and take space first. You have to contribute a little bit first, even just by paying attention to what other people are doing and saying something thoughtful. That’s true offline too—you don’t join a new soccer team and immediately get to be captain, you show up to practice and pass the ball to other people first.
For other parents who run into this error with their kid, there are a few concrete things that worked for us that you can try. First, always validate the frustration first—don’t brush it off as “just a dumb online rule” when your kid put real work into whatever they want to share. Use that line I used, it takes 10 seconds and keeps them from shutting down. Second, explain the rule in plain language, don’t just say “that’s how it is.” Kids are way more willing to play along if they know why it exists. Third, help them make the 5-minute-a-day plan, and tell them the trick about specific comments instead of generic one-liners—most new users don’t know that, and it cuts down the time to get karma by half. If your kid really can’t wait, and the project is time-sensitive (like they want feedback for a school contest or something), you can post it once from your account, but make sure you help them build their own account after that. It’s not worth skipping the small lesson just to save 10 days.
Right now, my son’s account is three months old. He posts a new build every couple of weeks, and last week I saw him leave a comment for another new user explaining the 10-day 100-karma rule, just like I explained it to him. He still complains about stupid online rules sometimes—last week he was mad that a meme sub required 1000 karma to comment. We haven’t figured that one out yet, and I still post the occasional meme for him when he’s really impatient. But this first one worked out. It’s not a big, life-changing moment, just a small thing that taught him more about being online than any of my talks about screen safety ever did.
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