What Is a Reddit Profile?

A Reddit profile is the public page belonging to one account, found at reddit.com/user/ followed by the username. It shows the account's avatar, karma, creation date, and lists of the posts and comments it has made.

What is on it

• Username and avatar. The permanent u/ name, plus a changeable display name and picture.
• Karma. Usually shown as one number, though four separate totals exist behind it.
• Cake day.The account creation date, and with it the account's age.
• Posts and comments tabs. Separate listings, each capped at roughly 1,000 items per sort order.
• Follower count, for accounts with a profile subreddit. The follower list itself is not public.

Profile versus subreddit

Both use a short prefix and both look like communities, which causes regular confusion. A profile is u/name and belongs to one person. A subreddit is r/name and is a shared community with moderators and rules.

Confusingly, a profile can behave a little like a subreddit: accounts can post directly to their own u/ page, and other users can follow it. It is still a personal page, not a community.

Example

Visiting reddit.com/user/example_user shows their karma and cake day at the top, with tabs beneath for Overview, Posts and Comments. Overview mixes both content types; the other two separate them. Most accounts have several times more comments than posts, so the Posts tab alone gives a misleading picture of how active someone is.

What a profile does not show

Votes, saved posts, hidden posts, subreddit subscriptions, private messages, and anything identifying the person behind the account. None of these are public for any account, and there is no setting that makes a profile private either.

Related terms

• Karma — the score displayed at the top of every profile.
• Reddit username — the permanent name a profile URL is built from.
• Subreddit — an r/ community, not to be confused with a u/ profile.