Reddit Post Karma vs Comment Karma: What Each Number Counts

Every Reddit profile shows two scores, and the difference between post karma vs comment karma decides which doors on the site are open to you. Post karma accrues from votes on things you submitted. Comment karma accrues from votes on things you replied with. Both feed the same reputation system, and neither one is a vote count.

That last point is where most explanations of Reddit karma go wrong, so it is worth starting from what Reddit itself publishes rather than from what the numbers look like.

What is the difference between post karma and comment karma?

Post karma is the score derived from upvotes and downvotes on your submissions. Comment karma is the score derived from upvotes and downvotes on your comments. Reddit keeps them as separate running totals and displays both, along with a combined total.

Reddit's help center describes the mechanism in one sentence: "Your karma is a reflection of the upvotes and downvotes you receive on posts and comments you've made." It then explains how to read the split, and the answer differs by platform. On reddit.com you click your avatar, open your profile, and hover over the total karma in the profile card to see the post and comment breakdown. On iOS and Android you open your profile and tap the About tab, where the breakdown is shown directly.

The distinction matters because communities gate on the two numbers separately. A user with 40,000 post karma from image submissions and 12 comment karma reads, to an AutoModerator rule, as a near-new account.

What does Reddit publish about how karma accrues?

Very little, and the omission is deliberate. The entire published mechanism is: upvotes push karma up, downvotes push it down, and participation in communities you care about is how you earn it. Reddit's advice is "Don't set out to accumulate karma; just set out to be a good contributor, and let your karma simply be a reflection of your legacy."

There is no published multiplier, no per-subreddit weighting, no decay rate and no cap. Reddit does not state whether a post worth 10,000 upvotes yields 10,000 post karma, and the help center goes out of its way to say it does not.

Why do the numbers not match my vote counts?

Because Reddit says they do not. The help center's list of things to keep in mind opens with this: "Since it's just an approximate reflection, upvotes and karma don't have a 1:1 relationship."

That is the whole published explanation. Reddit names the relationship approximate and declines to define the approximation. Anyone quoting a conversion ratio is quoting a guess.

Hacker News, by contrast, publishes a rough formula for the equivalent number. Its FAQ answers the question "How is a user's karma calculated?" with "Roughly, the number of upvotes on their posts minus the number of downvotes. These don't match up exactly. Some votes are dropped by anti-abuse software." Two large link-aggregator communities, two different levels of disclosure. If you want the mechanics behind the other one, the Hacker News ranking algorithm is documented in comparable detail.

Where do the karma numbers live in the Reddit API?

Two endpoints expose them, and a third uses karma as an input.

GET /api/v1/me/karma is the interesting one. It is the only documented way to see karma sliced by community, it works only for the authenticated account, and it is the mechanism behind the per-subreddit thresholds discussed below. The wiki_edit_karma field is a reminder that karma gates are not only about posting: a subreddit can require a karma minimum before you may edit its wiki, and that particular gate is configurable straight through the API.

What do subreddit karma gates actually check?

Not one number. Reddit's Poster Eligibility Guide documentation lists exactly what a gate can evaluate, and the list has seven entries:

• Comment karma, meaning total comment karma against what the community requires
• Post karma, meaning total post karma against what the community requires
• Combined karma, meaning post plus comment karma against the requirement
• Comment subreddit karma, meaning "the redditor's comment karma within your community relative to the amount needed to post"
• Account age, the minimum age of the account
• Verified email, whether one is required
• Is Contributor, whether the account is an approved submitter

The fourth entry is the one people miss. Sitewide karma does not satisfy a subreddit-karma rule. You can hold six figures of comment karma across Reddit and still fail a gate that asks for five comment karma earned inside that specific community, because it is a different counter.

Reddit describes the plumbing too. The Poster Eligibility Guide "uses automod configs to derive user eligibility," the evaluation "updates every six hours," and communities cannot opt out. It also acts only on rules set to remove, not filter: "The Poster Eligibility Guide won't act on automod criteria with the action set to filter."

Why will nobody tell me the threshold?

Because Reddit made that a policy. The same document states: "Specific karma and account age thresholds used by communities aren't disclosed at this time to deter potential misuse."

So the interface tells you that you failed a karma check without telling you by how much. Where those thresholds come from, how moderators write them, and how to clear one is covered in more depth in our guide to Reddit karma requirements.

Karma is also not the only account signal in the filter. Reddit's Contributor Quality Score places every account into one of five tiers, from Highest to Lowest, and moderators combine it with karma in AutoModerator. Reddit's own example rule reads:

#Basic rule filtering users with <5 subreddit karma and CQS scores of either "lowest" or "low"
type: comment
author:
    combined_subreddit_karma: "< 5"
    contributor_quality: "< moderate"
action: filter
action_reason: "CQS Filter"

combined_subreddit_karma, combined_karma, comment_karma, post_karma and contributor_quality are all fields a moderator can write into a config file on the subreddit wiki. That is the real answer to "what does the gate check": whatever the moderators typed.

Which one should a brand account build?

Comment karma, for two reasons that come straight from how the gates are written.

The first is coverage. Communities gate posting far more often than commenting, and the karma type most frequently required is the one you build by replying in that community. Comment subreddit karma cannot be imported from anywhere else on the site.

The second is that the alternative is against the rules. Reddit's spam policy treats karma farming as a violation, and accounts that trip the filters end up in the quiet failure state described in our post on the Reddit shadowban, where submissions go through but nobody sees them. The published route is the boring one: Reddit's own advice is to earn karma "by participating in communities that you have an interest in and making posts and comments people enjoy and upvote."

What karma does not do

Karma does not buy ranking. That is worth stating because the assumption is so common. Hacker News answers the equivalent question directly, with "Do posts by users with more karma rank higher? No." Reddit publishes no claim in either direction, which means anyone asserting that high-karma accounts get a ranking boost on Reddit is filling a gap the company has left empty.

What karma does is open gates. It is an access token for communities, wikis and programs, and the number itself is a byproduct.

Frequently asked questions

Does post karma or comment karma count more?

Neither, on a sitewide basis. Reddit publishes no weighting between them. What varies is which one a given community checks, and the Poster Eligibility Guide shows that a rule can test post karma, comment karma, combined karma or community-specific comment karma independently.

Can karma go negative?

Comment karma can, post karma cannot. Reddit's AutoModerator documentation notes that comment karma will not go below -100 and that post karma will not go below 0, so the combined figure bottoms out at -100 as well.

Does deleting a post remove its karma?

Reddit does not publish an answer. The help center describes karma only as an approximate reflection of votes received and says nothing about what happens to the score when the content is removed, so any specific claim about it is untraceable.

How do I see my karma in a single subreddit?

Through GET /api/v1/me/karma, documented as "Return a breakdown of subreddit karma." It only works for the account you are authenticated as, so you cannot look up someone else's per-community karma this way.

Why did my post disappear without a removal message?

Often a karma gate. Reddit's help center states that "some communities require a certain amount of karma before allowing you to post there" and that this is done "to prevent spamming within the community." Where the AutoModerator action is set to remove, the post is gone with no notification.

Is total karma the same as post karma plus comment karma?

Reddit displays a total alongside the two components and never publishes the arithmetic relating them. Treat the total as the number the interface shows rather than a sum you can reconstruct, since Reddit has already said the underlying counts are approximate.

Do high-karma accounts rank higher on Reddit?

Reddit publishes no claim in either direction. Hacker News answers the equivalent question directly, saying posts from users with more karma do not rank higher. Reddit's silence means anyone claiming a ranking boost for high-karma accounts is filling a gap the company left empty.

What is Reddit's Contributor Quality Score?

It sorts every account into one of five tiers, from Highest to Lowest. Moderators combine it with karma numbers inside AutoModerator, as in a rule that filters comments with under 5 combined subreddit karma and a CQS of lowest or low. It works as a second trust signal alongside the karma count.

Does account age count toward a subreddit's posting gate?

Account age is one of the seven criteria the Poster Eligibility Guide can evaluate, alongside the karma types, verified email and Contributor status. A subreddit can set a minimum age and enforce it the same way it enforces a karma minimum, through an AutoModerator rule. Clearing the karma bar does not help if the account is younger than the age floor a community set.

What happens when a subreddit's karma rule is set to filter instead of remove?

The Poster Eligibility Guide only acts on AutoModerator rules whose action is set to remove, so a rule set to filter never triggers its automatic enforcement. A filtered post gets held for a moderator to review instead of vanishing outright. Two subreddits with the same karma threshold can produce different outcomes for the same account depending on which action their moderators chose.