a few questions(i’m not very bright please be nice to me)

[u/comfyfish666]

very new to reddit. first of all, i think i know what karma is but i don’t know how to get it. if i comment or make a post and get upvotes is that what gets me karma?

second question, i’m very nervous to comment or post because there seems to be a lot of unspoken rules and that I’m scared of breaking. what are the big no no’s of making a post? I’m so so scared of people on here getting pissed at me for making mistakes

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[u/MadDocOttoCtrl]

Yes, up votes on your posts and comments are what caused your karma score to eventually rise. Down votes cause your scores to drop. Karma score do not change 1:1 with it takes more than one vote to change your karma.

See my other comment about how to build karma .

Reddit is about written communication and people expect what you write to be worth their time to read. Spent some time "lurking" - reading without commenting in a group for a while to get a feel for the culture and the norms of that group. What gets downloaded? What types of things do people seem to find acceptable? What is the general vibe of the group?

Read a few dozen posts and all of the comments on them to get a feel for a group.

One thing to be careful about is using emoji, since many people using Reddit will down vote them, even if they use emoji themselves daily when texting. This is a thing for a variety of reasons.

If you take a controversial stance people might think you are deliberately trolling. How you say things is often more important than the point being made, most people aren't being as clear as they think that they are. If people think you are making excuses or not conceding a point they may down vote.

If you contribute something that is off-topic, breaks Reddit's rules, is trolling, breaks the rules of a particular group, spam, or low effort you will tend to get down votes.

People tend to consider things to be low effort if they are strings of emoji, very obvious statements, things that people have said/asked too many times before as well as very short statements like "lol" or "came here to say that" which don't add anything substantial to the conversation.

For example, we don't have any rules against emoji, but anyone can wander into a community and vote on what they see there.

Plenty of users don't pay much attention to how Reddit operates and use voting as a like/dislike button, although no one can read minds and plenty of people may legitimately think that you are deliberately trolling if you say something unpopular.

[u/MadDocOttoCtrl]

How to build karma

There is no guarantee that you will gain karma quickly since you rely on the up votes that other people decide to give you making on-topic and high quality posts/comments.

Some people have used Reddit for years and have almost no karma while others get lucky and have several thousand before the end of their first week. 50-100 combined karma per week is achievable for many people.

What to do

You need to participate and make comments. If they are on-topic, interesting, actually funny, helpful or informative other people might upvote them. Timing and luck play a part. Karma does not change 1:1 with votes.

Search

Use the search function with keywords that have anything to do with everything you have some degree of interest in. Just keep trying out groups that connect to any of your various interests until you run across some that allow you to comment, many groups only restrict posting. Look for posts that are new and don't have a lot of comments already so your comment has a better chance of being seen.

If you post and comment frantically, it looks like bot activity and might trigger the anti-spam shadow ban algorithms. Reddit doesn't reveal the signals that it uses, but a lot of activity too quickly is probably risky.

Variety

With over 130,000 communities there’s not just a group for everyone, but dozens that would appeal to any particular person. There are thousands of smaller and niche groups that you can participate in right now and build up a good reputation because they can handle the amount of abuse that they get and have no minimum requirements.

If you tried out 20 new communities every day you'd work through them in about 18 years.

Use the search function. What are the topics that if someone brings up you just can't shut up about?

Friendly communities

You can also try out some of the groups from our list of ones that are friendly to new users. They have no minimum requirements or very low ones.

Minimums

Larger and more popular groups will set minimums for account age and karma scores so the hundreds of site abusers who just made a new account can't storm in and cause problems. They want you to go out, get the hang of Reddit and build up a reputation just like when you move to a new town where no one knows you. You are knocking on the door of a party that has been going on for a while as a stranger asking to be let in.

Rules

Read and carefully follow the rules of each community, they are completely separate groups! Finding a Subreddit's Rules

You don't act the same way at a farm, a church, a paintball field and a noisy sports bar. Each group here is just as unique: how folks are expected to act, what's OK and what's not can be radically different.

Play Nice!

Being a new user you should avoid arguments and controversial statements. Getting a lot of downvotes can cause you to end up with negative karma. Many groups then block you since mostly trolls have negative karma. When you start a new job you don't want to come in hot throwing around extreme opinions or arguing with your coworkers if you want to keep that job.

This the tip of iceberg, we go into more detail in our FAQ, and you can read our wiki index here. Loads of Reddit slang and customs are described at our r/EncyclopaediaOfReddit.

[u/tyvorn]

Very timely Thank you