Why your teen can’t post to Reddit: a parent’s guide to karma and account age rules
I was folding soccer uniforms at the kitchen table last Tuesday when my 13-year-old Jax sighed so loud it cut over the hum of the dryer. He slammed his phone face-down hard enough to make my stack of socks tip over. “It’s so stupid,” he said. “I didn’t even do anything wrong.”
I wiped a smudge of grass stain off my jeans and leaned over. Jax had spent three weeks hunched over his iPad after school sketching Daffodil, the cat from Spiritfarer, adding little hand-drawn texture with a Procreate brush he’d found on a fan forum. He’d been dying to post it to the big Spiritfarer fan subreddit, where hundreds of other teen artists share work and swap tips. I pulled his phone over, and there it was, the bright pop-up message every new Reddit user sees eventually: “In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.”
I’d had a Reddit account back in college, so I vaguely knew what karma was, but I hadn’t thought about it in a decade. Jax had only ever used TikTok and Instagram, where you make an account and post 60 seconds later. To him, this rule was arbitrary, mean, and a personal insult. “They don’t even know I’m not a troll,” he said. “Why do I have to wait just to show one drawing?”
I almost offered to post it from my old dusty account, which still has a random 12k karma from 2008 movie threads I don’t even remember writing. But then I stopped. I clicked through to the subreddit’s rules page, and the mods had a short explanation for the rule I’d never really thought about before. They get 10-15 spam posts a day from new accounts: stolen art, crypto scams, hate speech, people trolling the fan community with off-topic garbage. Most of these bad actors just make a new account every time they get banned, so putting a small barrier in place filters out almost all of that noise before it ever hits the community feed. It’s not personal, it’s just housekeeping.
I explained that to Jax, but he still didn’t buy it. So I made him a deal: we’d spend 10 minutes a day for the next 10 days commenting on other people’s posts, and by the time his account was old enough, he’d have his 100 karma. I didn’t tell him to just leave generic “cool art” comments, either. I told him to pick three posts a day that he actually liked, and leave one specific thing about the work. If someone drew a really good Stella, say that you loved how they drew her raincoat. If someone shared a WIP, ask them what brush they used for the background.
He thought this was the dumbest thing I’d ever made him do, but he was so desperate to post his drawing that he agreed. The first day, he got three upvotes total. By the end of the first week, he was up to 62 karma, and he started coming to me with random little updates. One guy who posted a comic had given him a tip for fixing the wonky line work on the edge of Daffodil’s scarf, a problem he’d been struggling with for days. Another girl had linked him to a free brush set that made his textures look way better than the one he’d been using. By day 9, he’d hit 97 karma, and he stayed up 10 extra minutes after brushing his teeth to leave one more comment on a post about favorite in-game moments. He got three more upvotes that night, and hit 100 just before his 10-day deadline.
It clicked for me then what this rule actually does, beyond stopping spam. Big social media platforms are built for instant gratification: you post, you get likes, you leave. You don’t have to engage with anyone else before you share your own stuff. But small, community-run spaces work differently. This rule forces new people to slow down, participate, and get a feel for the group before they ask the group for attention. It’s a small lesson, but it’s one most kids don’t get anymore when every app is designed to let them put their work out in the world immediately.
For parents who run into this same rule with their kid, there’s no trick to get around it that’s worth doing. You can post from your account, but that skips the whole point of them joining their own community. Instead, the concrete stuff that worked for us is simple: sit down and read the mod explanation together so your kid sees the rule isn’t just being mean for no reason. Help them brainstorm specific, genuine comments instead of generic spam to build up karma. If they’re frustrated, point out that the 10-day wait gives them time to tweak their own work before they post it, which is what happened for Jax. He fixed that wonky scarf line and swapped out his background brush before posting, and the final version was way better than the one he’d had ready 10 days earlier.
This past weekend, Jax’s drawing got 121 upvotes, and he’s been trading WIPs with a kid from Vancouver who loves the same game. He still complains sometimes that the rule is unfair, and says it’s dumb that long-time users don’t have to jump through the same hoops. Last night he told me he wants to join a different indie game sub that requires 1000 karma to post, so we’re starting the whole process over again. It’s not a big, life-changing lesson, and I still worry about how much time he spends online. But for the first time in a long time, an arbitrary online rule ended up working out better than any talk I could have given him about what it means to be part of a group.
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