How to increase karma on reddit without tripping a single filter

Karma is not a vanity number. Most subreddits worth posting in quietly filter accounts below a karma or age threshold, so a founder who wants reddit to send customers has to earn the floor first. The good news: the floor is low and two weeks of deliberate commenting clears it.

Why low-karma accounts get removed

Three separate systems can eat your post and only one of them tells you. Subreddit AutoModerator rules remove posts from accounts under a minimum karma or age. Reddit's own spam filter watches for link-heavy early activity. And human moderators remove anything that smells promotional from an account with no history. If your first act on reddit is posting your product, all three fire at once.

What actually earns karma

1. Answer questions in big help subreddits. Threads asking for help convert comments into upvotes at the highest rate, because the asker upvotes anything useful and so do lurkers with the same problem.
2. Sort by rising, not hot. A useful comment on a thread with 40 upvotes and 12 comments gets read. The same comment on a 5,000-upvote thread lands on page four of the comments and dies.
3. Write three sentences, not one. One-line comments read as karma farming and get reported. A specific answer with a number or a step in it reads as a person.
4. Stay inside two or three subreddits at first. Moderators check profiles. A profile that lives in r/startups and r/SaaS looks like a member. One that sprays 15 subreddits in a day looks like a bot.

Where to earn it: channels that accept new accounts

This is the part most guides skip. Big subreddits remove low-karma contributions on sight, so trying to earn your first karma in them is a loop: you need karma to earn karma. The way out is starting in high-volume subreddits that gate posts but leave comments open:

• r/AskReddit. Thousands of question threads a day and comments from new accounts stick. Sort by rising and answer early with something specific.
• r/NoStupidQuestions and r/answers. Built for exactly the behavior that earns karma: clear answers to direct questions.
• r/explainlikeimfive. If you can explain one thing you genuinely know in plain words, this sub converts that into karma reliably.
• r/CasualConversation. Low stakes, friendly voting culture, good for aging an account with normal human activity.
• The help subs for your actual craft. Whatever you do professionally has a sub where beginners ask questions you can answer in your sleep. This karma also makes your profile look coherent when moderators check it later.

Rules change and every subreddit publishes its own, so skim the sidebar before your first comment there. The pattern holds: comment-open plus high question volume equals a channel where a new account can contribute without being auto-removed.

The habits that get accounts banned

• Posting a link in your first ten contributions. Earn plain-text history first.
• Commenting on archived or locked threads through old links. Nothing posts there and repeated attempts flag the account.
• Deleting downvoted comments and reposting them. Moderators see removals.
• Upvote trades and karma-farming subreddits. They work for a week and then the account is shadowbanned, which reddit never tells you about. Check by opening your profile in a private window.

What karma unlocks for a founder

Reddit threads rank in Google for years and AI assistants read them when they answer buying questions. A helpful comment in the right thread is read by every future person who lands there from search. That is the real prize: not the points, the placement. We wrote a separate guide on the full reddit marketing strategy once the account can post.