If you have ever used social media for honest recommendations, no-bullshit discussion, quality conversations, and overall better social media content, you will agree with us that Reddit outperforms almost all others.
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For the past few years, social media marketers have been abusing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and every other social platform for their business benefits. Even though these platforms are constantly updating their policies and coming up with stringent rules, users are having a tough time protecting their privacy, ad choices, and content choices.
Reddit is anti promotional
Thankfully, Reddit is still what it was originally created for; a platform for like-minded people to share their thoughts, ideas, recommendations, and discussion-worthy content. Despite their desperate attempts, marketers have still not been able to spam Reddit with their promotional content (at least not as badly as they have done to Facebook).
Ever wondered why?
Reddit Karma is one of the primary reasons why it is still away from the clutches of marketers.
A lot of users compare Reddit Karma with Facebook likes. PLEASE DO NOT BELIEVE THEM. It is much more important on Reddit than likes, retweets, shares, etc.
Reddit Karma represents a user’s reputation, which is built based on his contributions. The better the contributions, the better will be his karma. And, the better karma a user has, the more trustworthy he (and his contributions) are considered.
So, if you are a Redditor, you will earn karma by adding value to the subreddits of which you are a member.
Hold on! There is a big catch here.
The answer to ‘how to get karma on Reddit’ is rather more twisted than you might have assumed.
Simply posting and commenting on subreddits and threads isn’t a solution to ‘how to get karma on Reddit fast’. It involves much more because your fellow redditors will decide if you should earn karma points or not (we told you it’s tricky).
Here is a detailed explanation.
What is Reddit Karma?
Beside every Reddit post or comment, you will see two small icons, an upward arrow and a downward arrow. There are a few other buttons that let you share the post, comment or on, report about it, etc. but they have nothing to do with Reddit karma points.
Reddit karma is basically its voting system. But, unlike Facebook where you only have an option to ‘like’ a post or comment, Reddit gives you the power to unlike a post or comment by using the downward arrow. When you post something, Redditors will either upvote it or downvote it. When your content gets upvotes, you earn positive karma and when it gets downvoted, you earn negative karma points. Then negative karma is subtracted from positive karma and the final result will be your karma points.
Is there a difference between comment and post karma?
Your karma points on Reddit will be displayed in your profile. Earlier they were divided into two types; post karma points and comment karma points. But now, they have been clubbed together.
Note: When a post or comment gets lots of upvotes, it continues to remain at the top of the thread. Similarly, if it gets a lot of downvotes, it will be pushed down towards the bottom of the thread, and eventually, it will get hidden.
So, if you are wondering how to get karma on reddit, all you need to do is to add content that other redditors will like.
And how will you figure that out? Don’t worry; this blog is all about helping you understand how to get karma on Reddit fast.
First, let’s understand why everyone is fussing about the imaginary karma points on Reddit. Do they really matter, considering that you can’t buy anything using them or earn any kind of privilege?
Here is our answer.
Why do you need Reddit Karma?
Before you read this in-depth blog on how to get positive karma on Reddit, please understand that these points do not have any intrinsic value. As redditors say, they are just ‘imaginary internet points’ that can’t be used in any way to earn or do anything.
So, why is ‘how to get karma on Reddit fast’ a hot topic on the internet?
That’s because it helps improve your profile and makes you sound genuine and an expert in a specific topic. People who have thousands of positive karma points are obviously more reliable than a newbie with just a few or no Reddit karma points. Your Reddit karma shows how active you are on the platform. It shows your reputation.
But why is it so? Why are people with more karma points thought to be more reliable and reputable?
That’s because these people are quite active on Reddit. They are the ones who add value to the platform. They post content that is worth posting and worth reading. Plus, they also ensure that others too abide by these rules. They spend hours and days ensuring that the marketers and spammers do not bombard the subreddits with crappy content and marketing pitches.
People with lots of positive karma points definitely deserve a round of applause. This is because you can’t just earn karma points by posting and commenting. You earn them only when others like your content. So, you have to be extremely careful while adding anything to this social media platform. One wrong piece of content and you could lose too many karma points.
Well, a good reputation is not the only reason why you should be learning about how to get comment karma on Reddit. A few subreddits, especially the marketplace subreddits, require you to earn a minimum karma points before joining them.
So now that we have explained why ‘how to get karma fast on Reddit’ is a trending topic these days, let’s understand how you can do that.
Interested in seeing what Redditors have the most Karma?
You can check out this great site: karmalb.com
How much karma do you need to make a subreddit?
We actually have a post that goes into this, in depth and you can read it here.
To summarize though:
- Your account must be at least 30 days old.
- Your account must have met a certain minimum requirement of karma. No one knows what this is but it’s speculated that its around 50 karma.
What is negative karma?
Negative karma is when users down vote your posts and comments. An example.
Can a user have an overall negative karma score?
We had a hard time answering this question because we haven’t recently seen a user with an overall negative karma score. In our research we found out that it does seem to be possible but that the cap may be limited to a -100.
We will be on the lookout and will update this article when we know more.
What is r/karma?
The subreddit r/karma is dedicated to answering questions about Reddit’s karma system. We highly recommend it if you have any more specific questions that we cannot answer in this guide.
How to get karma on Reddit?
Before we begin, we want to set your expectations right. We cannot tell you how to get karma on Reddit fast. In fact, no one can. This is because, much like reputation, building positive karma takes time and effort. There are no shortcuts.
You will have to be patient. You will have to be thoughtful and creative (and witty!). You will have to make sure that you provide something that adds more value to the discussion instead of spamming it with the same thing that has been mentioned already or with something irrelevant.
So, if you want to know how to get quick karma on reddit, this blog may not be able to address your question but if you want to understand how to earn positive karma on Reddit the organic way, we can help.
Here is what you need to do:
1. Ask for Karma – But can be risky
There are subreddits like Free Karma 4U where users upvote each others comments/posts. Be careful however with places like this as it’s rumored that posting and participating in subreddits like these can actually get you banned from other subreddits that you may be interested in.
2. Karma Farming
Karma farming can be a very effective technique for quickly building Reddit Karma. How does it work? Simple:
- Find older Reddit posts of images/memes that were highly upvoted.
- Repost them in the same subreddit or others
- Profit?
1. How to find older Reddit Posts using Reddit “Top Posts of All Time”
Go to a subreddit and select Top All Time:
2. Finding older popular Reddit Posts by using redditsearch.io
A better way we know of to systematically kind of create karma is actually to leverage a great tool that someone created.
So this tool is called redditsearch.io and it’s utilizing the pushshift API.
What we’re going to do is try to find some popular posts from a very popular subreddit from several years ago.
So the first thing we’re going to do is go to Custom.
- Start Date: 01/01/2016
- End Date: 12/31/2016
- Subreddit: aww
So let’s see what the most popular posts were from 2016 around then and here we go:
Anyone of these photos here, you could take, you know, you could throw a catchy title on it and repost that in r/aww or another subreddit and it’s highly likely that if you post it at the right time, you could get uploads and build some karma.
Now remember, and like we said, karma is not particularly valuable but for some people perhaps, it is.
Some warnings about Karma Farming
If you search Google for ‘how to get karma on Reddit fast’, you will come across numerous websites that claim to help you get a thousand reddit karma points within a week or two. Anyone can get tempted to hire them because doing it on your own requires a lot of time and brainstorming.
These websites are bots that practice ‘karma farming’, which is discouraged by Reddit.
Karma farming is done by posting and commenting randomly and in large numbers. Usually, the bots pick up popular older posts and repost them in your name. Since they used to be popular, they have more chances of getting upvotes.
Karma farming does deliver results but you could get banned if you get flagged. And, there are high chances of getting flagged because Reddit’s algorithm can track users who post, comment, upvote, and share content too frequently.
So, instead of focusing on how to get quick karma on Reddit, try to focus on how to share praise-worthy content. Karma will follow.
3. Leverage a Social Listening tool like Notifier to follow high profile users and comment when they post
With Notifier you can create a Searcher to follow high profile reddit users like u/GovSchwarzenegger.
Then when you can email from us that they have post, you can chime in much like this guy did:
3. Research highly upvoted posts to understand what works and what doesn’t
If you are new to Reddit and have no clue on how to get karma on Reddit, the best way to start is to do some research and understand what kinds of posts and comments generate maximum conversation. Every subreddit is different even if they are based on the same theme. You need to study all your relevant subreddit and identify what type of content works for each of them.
Usually, thought-provoking content or posts that encourage others to share their opinion, recommendations, ideas, etc. generate maximum engagements.
Below is an example. Within 15 hours, it generated more than 25k upvotes and 5k comments. People love to participate in mass discussions and share their experiences and advice, even though they are not that great.
Such posts work well with most subreddits. It is one of the proven ways of ‘how to get karma on reddit’.
Here is another example of questions that generate mass participation.
Humor and wittiness are also highly appreciated on Reddit.
See the example below. In our opinion, it is a lame joke but within 4 hours it received immense response, proving that anything that entertains people is worth posting.
Newbies who want to know ‘how to get karma points on Reddit’ should start with creating memes or jokes. It takes time to come up with creative memes but they are one of the most upvoted content on Reddit (provided you come up with the right meme).
Here is an example of a creative and humorous meme that generated a lot of upvotes and comments:
Success stories always work, no matter what.
Such stories are quite motivational and often encourage people to share their own stories too. But, before you choose to share your story, make sure it is powerful enough to generate some conversation. Try to share some off-beat examples.
Generic ones are often ignored. Even if you have a generic story, frame the content in a way that it sounds amazing. See this image for example. It is an extremely generic story but the redditor used the post to thank the community and it worked!
Criticism is appreciated too! So, feel free to criticize the posts that sound controversial.
See the example below. Redditors have both sympathized as well as severely criticized the writer. People who want to know how to get karma fast on Reddit, should look out for such posts and comment on them. If the comment is framed right, it could attract upvotes from many others who have the same opinion. The idea is to be honest and tell people they are wrong, if they are wrong.
While criticizing, make sure you maintain a civil tone and do not offend anyone.
Now that you know what to post, let’s learn where to post 🙂
For more details, feel free to check out our blog on ‘how to use Reddit for marketing’.
3. Choose the most active subreddits
Since your objective is to figure out how to get karma points on Reddit quickly, you need to identify large and most active subreddits where the chance of initiating a discussion is higher. Here is what you can do:
- Create a list of all subreddits relevant to your business or personal goals. Our tool Notifier can help you with this. You can set alerts for specific searchers or keywords and it can notify you when there is a discussion on them. You can track down the subreddits where the most number of discussions are happening. Once you have the list, select the most active ones from them. Study each of them thoroughly to understand the taste of the redditors of that group. Filter out the ones that are too difficult to crack such as the ones that have high editorial standards. The ones that are left should be good to start.
- Create a list of the most popular subreddits, whether they match your business or personal goals or not. Obviously, you will have a huge list. Now, filter out the ones that are too controversial or too irrelevant. Again, get rid of those subreddits that you don’t want to be a part of (such as breakup talks). Keep filtering until you have got a list of highly active subreddits that you believe you will be able to contribute to. The idea here is to earn more karma points organically, so you don’t necessarily have to stick to the ones that match your interest.
Now, luckily for you we also have a tool which shows the most active subreddits.
The image below shows a list of the top 10 subreddits with millions of members and hundreds of posts generated daily. But, do not limit yourself to these ones. Make your own list because only you can figure out the ones that will work for you.
No matter which one you choose, make sure you adhere to that subreddit’s policies, so you don’t get banned.
Plus, always remember that earning negative karma points is much easier than earning positive points. So, before you post something, check and recheck to ensure that you post something worthy.
4. Comment on other people’s posts
You can earn Reddit karma points not only by creating a new post but also by commenting on others’ posts. If your comment gets upvoted, you earn points for that.
The rules for commenting are the same as that of posting; no spam, no-nonsense, quality content only. But, here are some tips that you must know regarding how to get comment karma on Reddit.
- Do not stick to commenting on the post. Feel free to comment on someone’s comment to start a chain of discussion on it.
- Try to comment on new posts instead of the most popular posts. Popular posts already have too many comments and yours might just get buried. Commenting on the newest posts, especially the ones that have high chances of becoming popular, will help you get upvotes. This is because people not just read posts but also go through at least a few comments shown below them. If your comment is witty and engaging, you will surely get some upvotes. See the example below.
- Try to be the first one to comment. We understand that it is difficult unless you remain hooked up on Reddit so you can figure out the right post to comment on. But, at least try to be among the early 5 commentators, as they are the ones that get most of the attention. Now you know why it isn’t so easy to explain how to get Karma points on Reddit fast.
Engage with people who react to your posts or comments
Do not vanish after posting or commenting on something. Keep a track of the activities and engage with the commentators wherever needed. If you disagree with them, post your counter-argument, but obviously in a respectful manner. This will help keep the post active. Plus, you could even earn some upvotes on your responses!
Avoid responding to provocative comments and any comment that could earn you downvotes.
Some Other Interesting Ways to Get Karma
You can check out our older video tutorial for some interesting ideas and strategies to quickly building Karma on Reddit:
Comment on Posts
One of the easiest ways to get that karma but also one of the time-consuming way is simply to comment on different posts. So you are looking here at my Reddit homepage, I can just go to one of the posts here and write a helpful comment of some kind – you comment and hope that people upvote your comments.
Now, this is a bit difficult and time-consuming although you can kind of make a system out of this basically. So if you want to do this to get some real karma quickly, what you probably want to do is go to a very popular subreddit.
We we go to All under Home
And let’s say we go to r/wholesomememes
If you want to upvote karma, you do not want sort by the most popular ones initially. What you want to do is get your comment in there early so what you want to sort by is New. If you sort by New, you will the new posts that have just been posted and if you can get some amazing comments in here quickly, people may upload that. Because it’s been proven that the comments that receive that most upvotes are usually the early comments.
And you can see this guy who got in here a minute ago and said, “You have awoken the Christmas dragon”. So it’s highly likely that because he’s one of the first comments on this, if this post becomes popular, his comments could be one of the most upvoted ones.
And if you’re wondering why people may be doing this, there is some value in a Reddit account that has a lot of karma because what you can do is actually sell that Reddit account on these market places on the internet, believe it or not. So that could be one of the reasons why maybe some people are creating a box to kind of get upvotes and harvest Reddit karma so it’s another thing to keep in mind. Although it’s not something we recommend because that is a very black hat.
Now as you can see this method is very time-consuming and it requires a certain bit of creativity, right? You have to be good at anticipating what comments could possibly get uploaded so it’s not a fantastic system in a lot of ways.
Create Memes
A third option and the final option we’re going to talk about is an approach that another customer of ours kind of told us about and that is by creating memes. So what he does and what he did early on in order to raise the karma of his main account is he actually started creating memes. He used two sources to create the memes and one that actually surprises me. But the main source initially that he did was creating memes using simply his own creativity. So he got an App called Mematic that he download from App Store, installed it in his iPhone and he was ready to go creating memes.
At some point, he actually ran out of ideas for memes and he went and hired a meme engineer actually, believe it or not, a person he found on Upwork who generated memes for him. Then he posted these memes in some popular kind of meme-related subreddits that were applicable to his niche and basically allowed his account to gain a lot of karma and even created quite a few opportunities for potential customers to see his memes, understanding and enlightening his brand from those memes they saw. So it allowed him to kind of build up a fun, modern, relevant brand by creating memes and there’s nothing more Reddit-like than creating memes for your brand and company.
And yeah, that’s the 3 ideas we have on how to build up karma quickly on Reddit. So comment organically on posts, harvest prior popular posts using the tool like redditsearch.io and then maybe some nontraditional things like creating memes either yourself or by hiring someone on Upwork to create those memes.
Wrap up
How to get karma points on Reddit is one of the trickiest questions we have been asked by many of our clients. It is tricky because it requires a lot of caution. With the right moves, you can earn hundreds of positive karma points from just one post. But, if you take it casually, you might not get a single Reddit karma point even after trying for weeks. If you turn off the redditors, you could end up with hundreds of negative karma points and get banned!
So, instead of focusing on how to get karma on Reddit fast, focus on how to build your reputation and emerge as a sensible, smart, witty, knowledgeable redditor whose content is worth reading. It will take some time but the wait is totally worth it.