What Is Reddit Karma?
Reddit karma is a public score attached to an account, earned when other users upvote its posts and comments and lost when they downvote. It is stored as four separate totals: post karma, comment karma, awardee karma and awarder karma.
The four totals
| Type | Earned from |
|---|---|
| Post karma | Votes on submissions. |
| Comment karma | Votes on replies. |
| Awardee karma | Awards the account received. |
| Awarder karma | Awards the account gave to others. |
Why it matters
Karma is the fastest signal available about an account, but only if you look at the split rather than the total. Post karma is cheap: reposting a popular image can earn thousands in a day. Comment karma accumulates slowly, one conversation at a time, and is much harder to manufacture.
An account with 80,000 post karma and 200 comment karma has broadcast a great deal and talked to almost nobody. An account with the reverse has spent years replying to people. Reddit shows a single combined number in most places, which hides exactly the distinction worth seeing.
Karma also has practical consequences: many subreddits set a minimum before allowing new members to post, which is why low-karma accounts are often invisible in busy communities.
Example
Account created 11 years ago
- Post karma
- 4,120
- Comment karma
- 96,430
- Awardee karma
- 1,205
Comment karma more than twenty times the post karma, over eleven years. This is a long-standing participant, not a content farm. The combined figure of roughly 101,000 would have told you none of that.
A caveat on the numbers
Karma is not a straight count of upvotes. Reddit deliberately obscures exact vote totals on popular content to make manipulation harder, so treat karma as an approximate scale rather than an exact tally.
Related terms
- Reddit profile — the page where karma is displayed.
- Cake day— the account's creation anniversary. Karma read against account age says far more than karma alone.
- Awards — paid tokens users give to content, which generate awardee and awarder karma.
See any account's karma split into all four totals.
Check an account's karma