Karma

Karma is Reddit's reputation score, a running tally that reflects how the wider community has voted on a user's contributions. It rises when other people upvote your posts and comments and falls when they downvote them, so it acts as a rough proxy for how helpful, interesting, or entertaining your activity has been judged to be. Reddit splits karma into two broad categories: post (or "submission") karma, earned from upvotes on the threads you create, and comment karma, earned from upvotes on replies you leave on other people's posts. The relationship between upvotes and karma is deliberately not one-to-one; Reddit applies dampening so that a post with thousands of votes does not translate into the same number of karma points.

On Reddit, karma functions as both social currency and a spam-control signal. Many subreddits set minimum karma thresholds before users can post or comment, and automated moderation tools often filter contributions from very low- or negative-karma accounts, making karma a barrier that throttles spammers, bots, and ban-evading throwaway accounts. Because visible karma can confer a sense of status, it also fuels behaviors such as "karma farming"—reposting popular content or chasing easy upvotes—and the buying and selling of aged, high-karma accounts, which complicates trust and authenticity across the platform.