Why your teen can’t post on most online forums: What the 10 day 100 positive karma rule teaches about online community
The clap of my 14-year-old daughter Lila’s laptop hitting the kitchen table made me jump mid-fold of her dirty soccer uniform. Half-eaten Cheerios sat soggy in her bowl next to it, and she spun around in her chair with that specific mix of teen annoyance and confusion only a blocked online post can spark.
“I just want to ask why my grandma’s succulent is turning mushy,” she said, leaning the screen toward me. There it was, plain as day: the message I hadn’t seen in years, but recognized immediately. In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
She huffed, scrolling through her previous attempts. She’d joined a small forum for teen plant hobbyists that a friend recommended, tired of the algorithmic garbage on TikTok plant accounts that only showed perfect $200 rare plants. She just wanted free, specific advice for her sad cutting. Now this. “Why can’t I just post? All my other accounts let me post right away. This is dumb.”
I tossed her uniform into the laundry basket and pulled a chair next to her. I’d run into the same rule when I joined a college knitting forum back in 2012, and I remembered being just as annoyed back then. But as I sat there, explaining what karma even meant to a kid who’d only ever used Instagram and TikTok, I started thinking about how this random, annoying rule is actually one of the best quiet lessons for kids learning to be online.
I told Lila we weren’t going to make a new account under my name to skip the requirement, or buy a verified badge to bypass the wait. If she wanted to ask the community for help, she had to meet their terms. She groaned, but agreed. For the next 10 days, she set a 10-minute timer after homework to engage with the forum. At first, she tried spamming “cool!” on 20 different photos to get quick upvotes. That only got her 12 karma total, so she adjusted.
She read through the new member guide, which said that most people upvote comments that add something to the conversation. One night, she saw a post from another 13-year-old who’d killed three pothos cuttings trying to propagate them. She typed out: “I killed three too last month! The trick I figured out is let the cut end dry out for 24 hours before you put it in water. I got three roots that way after that.” That comment got 37 upvotes. A few days later, she commented on a photo of a giant aloe vera that someone kept in their bathtub: “My grandma has one that size in her bathtub too! It’s so big it blocks the drain when she showers. Yours looks way healthier than hers, honestly.” That got another 28 upvotes. By the end of the ninth day, she had 104 positive karma.
When she finally posted her photo of the mushy succulent, she got three detailed replies in an hour. All three said she’d overwatered it, told her to pull it out of the wet soil, let the roots dry for two days, and repot it in cactus mix with extra perlite. She did exactly that, and a week later, a tiny new green leaf popped out of the center. She went back, updated everyone, posted a photo of the new growth, and thanked every person who replied.
What stuck with me wasn’t that she saved the succulent. It was that over those 10 days, she didn’t just rack up karma. She learned how the community works, in a way no talk I could give her would ever teach. Most of the time, we only talk to kids about online safety—don’t talk to strangers, don’t share your address. We rarely talk about how to be a good member of an online community. This rule doesn’t just block spammers and bots. It forces new people to contribute before they take.
Other platforms let you post within two minutes of making an account, so the default is to show up, ask for what you want (validation, help, attention) and leave if you don’t get it. No one has to put in any work to be part of the space. This rule flips that. It’s low-stakes: 10 days, 10 minutes a day, just enough to get used to how people talk there, to add a few useful things before you ask for something for yourself.
When other parents tell me their kid hit this rule and is throwing a fit about it, I tell them three small things that work. First, don’t bypass the rule. It’s not there to punish kids, it’s there to set expectations for the community. Letting them skip it robs them of the tiny lesson it teaches. Second, sit down with them for five minutes the first day and show them what a good comment looks like. Instead of “cool plant,” try “I love that pot, where did you find it?” It takes 10 extra seconds, and it’s way more likely to get a positive response that encourages them to keep engaging. Third, after they meet the requirement, ask them what they notice about the space compared to their usual apps. Most kids say it feels calmer, more helpful, because everyone there had to put in a little work first.
Last week, Lila joined a small forum for people who restore thrifted ceramic plant pots. When she saw the same 10 day, 100 karma requirement pop up, she just shrugged and closed the notification. “Alright,” she said, “guess I gotta go comment on some pots first.” I still worry a lot about what my kid picks up online, and there are still days she cuts corners just to hit the karma count faster. But this small, weird rule that felt like such a hassle that first day turned out to be one of the most useful lessons she’s had. It’s not a fix for all the garbage online, but it’s a good start.
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