Karma is the running score a community attaches to an account — roughly the sum of the votes its posts and comments have received. Reddit and Hacker News both use the term, and both use it for something other than what it looks like.
It looks like a scoreboard. It functions as a gate.
Why it matters
Communities need a cheap way to keep out accounts created that morning to drop a link. Karma is that filter. In practice it controls:
- whether you can post in a given subreddit at all
- whether you can post a link rather than text
- whether your submission goes live or lands in a moderation queue
- how much automated filtering treats you as suspicious
This is the part that surprises founders. Your first post to a large subreddit frequently vanishes with no comment, no removal notice and no downvotes. Nobody rejected it. You never cleared the gate, and the gate is silent by design — announcing the threshold would tell spammers exactly what to farm.
What goes wrong
Farming karma to unlock posting. A week of low-effort comments followed immediately by a product link is a pattern moderators see constantly, and the tooling flags it. The karma arrives and the account is still treated as new.
Assuming the rules are published. Most subreddit thresholds live in AutoModerator configuration and are deliberately not in the sidebar. Reading the rules page and concluding you're clear is not the same as being clear.
Treating post and comment karma as one number. Reddit tracks them separately, and many communities gate on comment karma specifically — precisely because comments are harder to farm than links.
The 9:1 rule. Still widely quoted as Reddit policy: one self-promotional post for every nine of anything else. It descends from an old self-promotion FAQ that no longer carries it sitewide. Individual subreddits set their own ratios, and some ban links outright. Quoting the old rule at a moderator does not help.
The honest limit
Karma buys permission to be heard. It buys nothing else.
An account with high karma posting a weak link gets the same result as a new account posting a weak link, one step later in the process. The gate is real, and clearing it changes nothing about whether the thing you posted was worth posting.
Which makes karma a prerequisite worth earning early — and a metric worth ignoring completely once you have it.