What is karma, and why do users care about it?

Karma is Reddit's numerical reputation system, a running score that reflects the cumulative reception of a user's posts and comments by the community. Every time another user upvotes a post or comment you have made, your karma increases; every downvote decreases it slightly. The score is not a direct one-to-one mapping of votes received — Reddit applies its own weighting and does not publish the exact formula — but broadly speaking, karma is a measure of how much value the community has attributed to your contributions over time. Users care about karma for several overlapping reasons. First and most practically, many subreddits impose minimum karma thresholds before allowing a user to post or comment, so low karma can lock you out of participating in communities you want to engage with. This is a deliberate anti-spam and anti-trolling mechanism: building enough karma to meet these requirements takes time and genuine participation, which makes it harder for bad actors to create fresh accounts and immediately cause problems. Second, karma functions as a social signal within the community. A user with tens of thousands of karma is implicitly vouched for as someone who has been contributing content that other Reddit users found valuable over an extended period, which lends a certain baseline credibility. Third, as of Reddit's Contributor Program launched in 2023 and evolving through 2024 and 2025, karma thresholds also determine whether a user qualifies to earn real monetary payouts from Reddit Gold given to their posts. Users who accumulate over 100 combined karma become eligible for payouts, and those with over 5,000 karma qualify as "Top Contributors" with a higher payout rate. This financial dimension has added a new layer of significance to karma that did not exist in Reddit's earlier years.