Why your kid sees “account must be 10 days old and 100 positive karma” when they try to post online
My 13-year-old was leaning against the kitchen counter last Tuesday, half-eaten Goldfish cracker sticking out of one side of his mouth, shoving his phone in my face. “Look, it won’t let me post. Why won’t it let me post?” He’d spent three weekends and all his birthday allowance on a custom Lego Genshin Impact minifigure, hand-painting the details and gluing on a tiny fabric cape. He’d made a new Reddit account specifically to share it with the custom Lego community he’d been scrolling for months. That’s when the error popped up: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
He’d never heard of karma, didn’t understand why a random website cared how old his account was. “I just want to show people my figure. What did I do wrong?” His voice was tight, the kind of tight that comes from working really hard on something and hitting a wall you didn’t know existed.
I’d seen that rule a hundred times as a casual Reddit user, but I’d never thought about how it feels to hit it as a kid, just trying to share something you care about. My first instinct was to offer my account—here, I’m 10 years old and have thousands of karma, just post it from mine. But I stopped myself. I’ve seen enough of these hobby communities get flooded with spam, scams, and random trolling from throwaway accounts made an hour earlier to know this rule isn’t just arbitrary gatekeeping. It’s a filter, and it’s there to keep the people who actually care about the hobby safe from the garbage that clogs up every open online space.
The problem is, no one explains that to kids when the error pops up. It just looks like the internet doesn’t want your stuff. The first thing I did that I think other parents should copy isn’t jump in to fix it. It was say the exact line: “That sucks. You worked this hard, and it feels unfair that you can’t share it right now, doesn’t it?” I didn’t tell him it was no big deal, I didn’t brush off his frustration. Just validated it, because for him, it was a big deal.
Then we broke it down together. I explained karma simply: it’s just a score other people give you when they like what you’ve said or shared. Communities use the 10 day/100 karma rule because almost all scammers and spammers make new accounts every time they get banned, so they never get to 10 days or 100 karma. It’s a cheap, easy way to keep most bad stuff out without having to pay a whole team of moderators to clean it up 24/7.
That still left the circular problem he pointed out: how do you get karma if you can’t post anything to get upvoted? That’s where the small, concrete steps come in. I didn’t just tell him “go comment on stuff.” I sat with him for 10 minutes and showed him how to do it in a way that actually gets upvotes, without being fake. First, we went to the community’s “hot” feed and picked three posts that he actually had something to say about, not just random posts he picked to farm karma. One was a kid showing off his first ever failed custom, calling it garbage. My son wrote, “I messed up three straight heads last month when I was practicing. Yours looks way better than my first tries did.” That got 12 upvotes by the next morning.
Another tip most kids don’t know: almost every hobby community has a pinned “introduce yourself” or “new member” thread at the top of the feed. You can post a quick line there saying you’re new, working on a custom you’re excited to share once you hit the karma requirement, and people almost always upvote you to help you out. That’s how he got another 30 karma in two days, no stress.
I’ve talked to a couple other parents who’ve had this same problem lately, and a lot of them get annoyed at the rule, or just post for their kid from their own account. I get that impulse—it’s faster, it stops the moping right away. But what I’ve noticed with my son is that waiting has actually been good for him. He’s been scrolling the community every night, commenting on other people’s work, picking up tips for his next project, instead of just posting his own and bailing. When he finally gets to post his minifigure, it’ll be his win, not mine, because he put the work in to join the community properly.
Today is day 8 of his account. He’s sitting at 87 karma right now. He still complains about the rule being dumb over breakfast sometimes, and I don’t argue with him—It is a little dumb, sometimes, when you’re 13 and you just want to show off the thing you made. He checks his karma count every night before bed, adds one or two comments if he’s got time. We still have two days and 13 karma to go, and there’s no guarantee his post will get much attention once he finally puts it up. But right now, this weird little rule that feels like a random hassle is teaching him a small, useful lesson about online spaces: most good communities aren’t just places to drop your own stuff and leave. They work when you stop, interact with other people first, and give a little before you take. It’s not perfect, but it’s working for us right now. We’ll see how it goes.
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