What is the difference between a main account and an alternate account?

A main account on Reddit is a user's primary identity on the platform — the account they use for most of their day-to-day participation, the one under which they have built their karma history and established their reputation in communities they care about. An alternate account, commonly called an "alt," is any additional Reddit account created by the same person and used for different purposes. Reddit does not prohibit users from having multiple accounts, but it does prohibit using multiple accounts to manipulate votes, evade bans, or otherwise violate platform policies. Alternate accounts are created for a wide range of legitimate reasons. Some users maintain a general-purpose main account for their regular interests and create a separate alt for topics they consider too personal, politically sensitive, or potentially embarrassing to discuss under their main identity. A person might have a main account where they discuss their hobbies and news, and a separate account where they ask questions about mental health, financial struggles, or relationship problems, deliberately keeping the two identities compartmentalized so that readers of either account cannot build a complete picture of their life. Others use alt accounts to participate in communities with strict karma or account-age requirements on a timeline different from their main account — though using an alt to bypass bans is explicitly against Reddit's rules. Some experienced Reddit users also maintain separate accounts for professional contexts, keeping their personal opinions and humor on a main account that colleagues do not know about while maintaining a separate, cleaner account for industry-specific subreddits. The key rule is that alternate accounts cannot be used to artificially inflate vote counts (brigading, using one account to upvote content from another) or to evade subreddit or platform bans imposed on the main account.