How to Reach 100 Karma on Reddit

Focus on one thing at a time and explain it thoroughly.

As a community site with high Google search authority, Reddit has over 100 million daily active users.

If you have a product to promote, you can find precise target users in the corresponding subreddits.

If you want to understand people's pain points and uncover product ideas, you can achieve your goal there as well.

If you want to verify whether a specific pain point you’ve identified is viable for a product, you can validate that on Reddit too.

This is the data from one of my posts; within 4 days, it reached 140,000 views and 244 comments. This is the foundation that supports the capabilities mentioned above. Unlike Zhihu, Reddit is extremely strict about filtering comments and posts. When your karma score is very low, you cannot post. If it detects that you are promoting your own products or including links, it will delete your post immediately. If you repeatedly trigger this, your account might be blacklisted or shadowbanned, leaving you unable to post or comment. So, how do you achieve "posting freedom"? The answer is that you must make contributions first, rather than trying to promote your product right away. An important quantitative metric for measuring contribution is your karma score. The higher your karma, the more freedom you have in your actions. So, how can you increase your karma score?

How did I do it?

1. Choice of registration location. Reddit is not friendly to users in mainland China. If your IP is detected as mainland China during registration, you are highly likely to be shadowbanned. This means you can continue to post and comment, but only you can see them. Therefore, when registering, it is best to choose an IP outside of mainland China. How do you do this? I trust that if you are able to access Reddit, you know how to handle this.
2. Interact proactively right after registration. For example, upvote some posts or comments.
3. Within the first week of registration, you can post comments at a low frequency. For every upvote a comment receives, you get 1 karma point.
4. Two weeks after registration, you can post highly interactive content in some subreddits. Recommended subreddits: askReddit, askAChinese, webscraping, etc. If the post is upvoted, you can also earn karma. Once you can post and comment, your karma score will generally continue to increase.
5. If your account accidentally violates rules and gets shadowbanned, you can either re-register an account or continue using the current one, still browsing Reddit information regularly, and it might be unbanned in about 2 weeks. If you re-register, you will need email verification. You can use temporary email services; I recommend: anonmails.de

How do you know if you are shadowbanned? On Reddit, log in with another account and search for your original account. If you cannot find it, you are shadowbanned.

How to promote your product? Once your karma reaches a certain level, you can promote and post your product links in certain communities.

What should you NOT do?

Things you should avoid to prevent affecting your Reddit account status:

1. Do not post within the first week of registration; just stick to low-frequency commenting.
2. Do not post frequently within the first two weeks of registration; keep it low-frequency.
3. Do not post comments or posts with links. Especially when your karma is low, do not try to promote your product. If you do, you are very likely to be shadowbanned.

Following the rules above will allow your karma to hit 100, unlocking the ability to post in any subreddit.

Other thoughts

Adjusting your mindset

After anchoring a goal, you will always encounter various setbacks and problems during the process. At such times, if you don't get positive feedback for a long time, it is easy to give up. When I accidentally came across a post by a veteran Redditor, I suddenly felt relieved and was no longer so anxious or impatient. Post content: Focus on understanding a subject rather than always harboring utilitarian emotions, thinking that every action must lead to immediate positive feedback, such as making money. This doesn't mean you have abandoned your goals or lost your direction. On the contrary, this mindset allows you to take certain things to the extreme, which actually makes it easier to achieve results. Another advantage of doing this is that you can gain something every day and turn it into content.

Conquering difficulties

Do challenging things, because that is how you achieve the extraordinary. When people have a choice, they often tend to pick things that are easy to implement with a low barrier to entry, as it is human nature. However, as the Bible says, when there are two doors of different widths to pass through, we should choose the narrow door, not the wide one. Because once you pass through the narrow door, you will find that the path ahead is flat and wide, while the path behind the wide door is narrow, crowded, and full of thorns. But the choice of the narrow or wide door is your starting point. To squeeze through the narrow door is extremely difficult, but the effort is worth it. For example, conquering Reddit started back in September last year. Although I didn't see progress every week, I never gave up until August, when after burning through 11 accounts, the 12th one finally succeeded.

Find a method, then persist

Many things, especially medium- to long-term ones, cannot be achieved overnight. They often require the factor or variable of time to succeed. At such times, besides testing your ability to persist, it also tests your judgment. Many times, we feel a goal might be unreachable and give up, but that is often an incorrect judgment. What is needed at that moment is to keep going. When you are tired and feeling down, you can take a short rest, but you need to be clear-headed after you recover.

As for finding a method, many methods are provided by experienced people before you have achieved results. Whether they suit you needs to be verified. However, if this plan has already been verified by others, it is at least worth a try, and you can make moderate adjustments along the way. For example, reaching a standard in English listening and speaking. Some people achieve it by practicing in English corners, some by watching original-sound movies, and some must live in an English environment to achieve it. These methods have been verified; you can choose one that suits you and persist for a certain amount of time, and there is a high probability you can succeed. But if you find it doesn't fit during the process, you can adjust the method and continue to persist to achieve results. I want to emphasize one other point here: once a method is determined, spend time doing it. There is no need to create too much doubt due to human flaws, which ultimately leads to giving up.

For sales, trust is the foundation

To make a sale, you must first have trust as a foundation. Many small transactions also require it. For example, buying daily necessities in a supermarket also requires trust in the supermarket and the brand of the daily necessities; otherwise, you definitely wouldn't buy them.

Reddit is not just a promotional channel; it can also be used to find users, dig for requirements, and verify product ideas.

But to gain freedom on Reddit, the prerequisite is to contribute first, not to promote immediately upon arrival. Accumulate Karma, understand community rules, and build trust; then, subsequent promotion will feel more natural.

Many things are the same: find a method, then persist, and time will amplify the results.

What do you think is the most valuable part of Reddit: customer acquisition, uncovering requirements, or product validation?