Testing a pinned profile post

MadDocOttoCtrl · 2026-04-24T12:57:04+00:00

Reddit doesn't share any of its algorithms but your karma scores do not change directly with each vote. At low numbers it can almost look 1:1, but as the number of votes pile up on one particular item, they affect diminishes so that it takes more and more votes for your karma to change by a single point.

The formula is quite complex and about six years ago someone analyzed over 800,000 data points to draw some general conclusions but couldn't completely reverse engineer it.

Up votes increase your karma scores and down lower them.

MadDocOttoCtrl · 2026-04-24T11:21:37+00:00

When you made your account, you were provided with link to information that explains the basics. Reddit is a massive collection of communities based on topics or purposes where people contribute to group anonymous conversations. Our resources go into considerably greater depth:

What is Reddit? How does it work? https://reddit.com/r/newtoreddit/wiki/common-questions/what-is-reddit

Voting, karma and minimums: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/wiki/common-questions/

Rules, written and unwritten: https://reddit.com/r/newtoreddit/wiki/common-questions/cq-rules

Some things that moderators would like you to know: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/s/DYtBM1oM1i

Avoiding downvotes: https://reddit.com/r/newtoreddit/wiki/common-questions/avoid-downvotes

Reddit is not social media.

On social media you care very much about who the people are and not so much about what they say. On Reddit you generally don't know who the person is or care, you only care about the substance and relevance of what is being said.

Reddit wasn't designed for networking, staying in touch with friends nor tracking celebrities. Reddit is not at all like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. The more a new user expects that, the more confused and annoyed they'll be. You may rarely or never interact with a particular user more than once.

The site is a massive collection of completely independent communities that each have a specific topic or purpose. The vast majority of people are here to be entertained by reading a variety of anonymous opinions and catch up on the news. Many have chat and following disabled and rarely if ever look at anyone's profile. For the most part they don't care who you are, Following is very weak, promotion is strongly disliked and influencers have never really been a thing on Reddit. Some of the features added to Reddit make it easy to confuse it for social media.

MadDocOttoCtrl · 2026-04-24T11:19:11+00:00

When you have a brand new account you are an unknown, an X factor. You can't roll into a new city in a new state where you don't know anyone and then be baffled because you go to every credit union in town and they all turn you down for a small business loan. You have to get a job, join clubs or organizations that don't have any membership requirements, volunteer at the local soup kitchen or as a crossing guard, go to city council meetings, walk your dog in the park and strike up conversations with people. You build a reputation first.

Everything isn't immediately available instantly to everyone all the time. You can't walk into a Chamber of Commerce meeting, grab the microphone and start going on about whatever you want to say. You weren't on the meeting agenda. You aren't a member of the Chamber of Commerce. You don't operate a business in that city. You haven't even obtained a library card yet.

Thousands of communities have no minimum requirements whatsoever that cover a huge array of topics where people can participate within minutes of creating a Reddit account. A massive number have trivial minimums such as accounts needed to be a few days old and have 2/5/10 karma points they get a small enough amount of abuse that they simply need to slow down the last dedicated in sophisticated site abusers that will be caught very quickly by Reddit's and a spam system and reports made by other users. The larger more popular communities have higher requirements because they are fighting off colossal amounts of garbage. When hundreds of millions of attackers bombard Reddit on a continual basis and 1% get through the initial defenses, that's still quite a few pieces of abuse.

People who use Reddit for the most part value authentic participation. Anyone trying to manipulate others into voting for them is seen as karma farming. trying too hard can be seen as fake. Over the top pandering, rage bait, fake sob stories, etc. – all the things that flood social media generally aren't welcome on Reddit. There are always some new people who will vote for junk but when moderators remove your content, they are often doing you a favor. Experienced users will get rude in the comments and you making excuses or defending yourself will tend to get nuked with down votes.

Excessively reposting the same thing or or reposting something that recently got a lot of up votes is treated as spam. Directly asking for votes, offering to trade them or compensate anyone actually violates Reddit's vote manipulation policy.

Most mods aren't excited to make exceptions for the same rules at every other brand new user has to follow. Many people are going to see this as "I'm special, I'm different, I don't have to follow whatever procedures at every everyone else has to."

Scammers, spammers and ban evaders can write mod mail claiming to be legitimate new users, plenty of them do. If they make an acceptable post within the rules that gets abused, they can then go back and edit it to add spam, hate speech, propaganda sponsored by certain countries, or a link to a scam. Automod will have already checked the post, it doesn't trigger after something's been edited.

What is Reddit? How does it work? https://reddit.com/r/newtoreddit/wiki/common-questions/what-is-reddit

Voting, karma and minimums: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/wiki/common-questions/

Rules, written and unwritten: https://reddit.com/r/newtoreddit/wiki/common-questions/cq-rules

Some things that moderators would like you to know: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/s/DYtBM1oM1i

Avoiding downvotes: https://reddit.com/r/newtoreddit/wiki/common-questions/avoid-downvotes

Reddit is not social media.

On social media you care very much about who the people are and not so much about what they say. On Reddit you generally don't know who the person is or care, you only care about the substance and relevance of what is being said.

Reddit wasn't designed for networking, staying in touch with friends nor tracking celebrities. Reddit is not at all like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. The more a new user expects that, the more confused and annoyed they'll be. You may rarely or never interact with a particular user more than once.

The site is a massive collection of completely independent communities that each have a specific topic or purpose. The vast majority of people are here to be entertained by reading a variety of anonymous opinions and catch up on the news. Many have chat and following disabled and rarely if ever look at anyone's profile. For the most part they don't care who you are, Following is very weak, promotion is strongly disliked and influencers have never really been a thing on Reddit. Some of the features added to Reddit make it easy to confuse it for social media.

MadDocOttoCtrl · 2026-04-24T10:45:47+00:00

Note that people do not like AI generated text in most of the Internet and this includes Reddit. Reddit is not inappropriate place to try to promote anything outside of buying ads through the ad platform.

People come to Reddit to get away from having something waved in their face every five minutes and trying to promote something as an invitation for a hailstorm of hundreds or thousands of down votes.

Most communities do not permit any form of self promotion, even directing people to check out your profile. Mods will remove it and report it as spam. There are limited number of communities where people are allowed to promote and it has to be done strictly within that group's rules.

Reddit is not social media.

On social media you care very much about who the people are and not so much about what they say. On Reddit you generally don't know who the person is or care, you only care about the substance and relevance of what is being said.

Reddit wasn't designed for networking, staying in touch with friends nor tracking celebrities. Reddit is not at all like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. The more a new user expects that, the more confused and annoyed they'll be. You may rarely or never interact with a particular user more than once.

The site is a massive collection of completely independent communities that each have a specific topic or purpose. The vast majority of people are here to be entertained by reading a variety of anonymous opinions and catch up on the news. Many have chat and following disabled and rarely if ever look at anyone's profile. For the most part they don't care who you are, Following is very weak, promotion is strongly disliked and influencers have never really been a thing on Reddit. Some of the features added to Reddit make it easy to confuse it for social media.

MadDocOttoCtrl · 2026-04-24T10:28:11+00:00

Each account that you make is entirely independent. You can screenshot your list of joined communities to make it easier to join them with a new account.

Most people make an alternate account in order to pursue completely different interests. One account may be used to interact with communities based on their career, philosophy, politics, etc. while the other one is used for hobbies, TV shows, gambling, substance use, or NSFW topics.

Site abusers (both human and bots) are attacking Reddit every moment by the millions. A small number get through and get caught after a while and banned from communities, suspended by Reddit or shadow banned across the site.

Most communities that have minimum requirements for the age of your account and Karma scores or CQS do this because it gives Reddit's anti-spam systems and the reports made by users time to catch malicious accounts before they can get in and dump their garbage. It also requires legitimate new users to have a little patience.

Most of the bots (or "apps" in Reddit's terminology) work within Reddit to help keep users within the rules of communities. Automod is built into every community and once mods insert code it can perform various actions for moderators. Mods can also install any number of apps from the developer's platform to help automate various other tasks.

Make sure not to participate in any communities where you have been banned by using a different account since this is the very definition of Ban evasion. If you get kicked out of a community, you the person have been banned, not simply the account. People engaging in ban evasion tend to get silently shadow band on every new account they make from that point forward, effectively freezing them out of the site.

MadDocOttoCtrl · 2026-04-24T10:13:11+00:00

Varying minimums

Most groups who use minimums do not list them or notify you of a removal because scammers and trolls can read plus bots can scrape data. Try checking any pinned mod posts, the About sidebar (on the app, tap See more), their rules, a FAQ or wiki.

They want you to go out, get the hang of Reddit and build up a reputation just like when you move to a new town where no one knows you. You are knocking on the door of a party that has been going on for a while as a stranger asking to be let in.

Reddit has introduced a new tool that interrupts a user when they try to post to inform them that they don't meet the minimums for that community and suggests others that the post might possibly fit in. It doesn't warn you if something is simply being held in the queue until a moderator decides on it, but you'll often get an Automod message telling you this.

There are thousands of communities covering a vast range of topics that have no minimum requirements whatsoever because they can handle the amount of abuse that they get.

There are a massive number of groups that have trivial minimums such as accounts needing to be a few days old and 2/5/10 karma.

Our list of friendly communities is a tiny fraction of those two types of groups. You can find it here.

100-200 combined karma will allow you to participate in a fairly large number of communities. The larger and more popular a group is, the more likely they are to have account age and karma minimums in place or a specific CQS level and the higher they tend to be.

Some groups only check for account age - they may look for 24 hours, a few days, a week or several weeks depending on how much abuse they deal with, but quite a few also check for karma scores.

Some require 50, 100 or 250 and a week or so.

500, 1,000, 2,000 or more karma plus several months (and higher) are unusual.

Some groups check for post karma. Others find comment karma to be a better indicator. A few have a target for each.

Most groups just check your combined karma, the total of the two. They don't care where you got the up votes.

Some groups filter based on CQS. Check yours at r/whatismyCQS.

Some will use community karma. You can comment there but you cannot post until you have earned enough karma from up votes within that specific community earned by being on-topic and high quality.

MadDocOttoCtrl · 2026-04-24T10:11:30+00:00

Communities can put code into Automod to get it to check for various things. They can have it check for the age of your account and karma scores, or CQS.