What types of karma exist (post vs. comment), and how are they earned?

Reddit tracks karma in two primary categories that are displayed and counted separately on a user's profile: post karma and comment karma. Post karma is earned when other users upvote your submissions to a subreddit — the links, images, videos, or text posts that you create to initiate a thread. Because posts require more effort to create and evaluate, and because the volume of posts is lower than the volume of comments across the platform, post karma tends to accumulate more slowly than comment karma for most users. A single viral post in a major subreddit can, however, add thousands of post karma points at once. Comment karma is earned when other users upvote your replies within a thread. Because commenting is the primary mode of participation for most Reddit users and comment threads can be very active, frequent commenters often build comment karma faster than post karma over time. The ratio of karma to upvotes received is not one-to-one in either category; Reddit deliberately caps and fuzzes the relationship between raw vote counts and karma awarded, in part to discourage karma farming and make the numbers less gameable. Beyond these two primary types, Reddit also tracks community karma, which is the karma earned specifically within a single subreddit. Some communities use community karma thresholds in their posting and commenting restrictions, requiring users to have demonstrated participation within that specific community before being granted full posting privileges. There is also combined karma, which is simply post karma and comment karma added together, and which is the figure most commonly used when subreddits set general karma requirements. Previously, Reddit awarded award karma through the coin-and-award system, but that system was deprecated in September 2023 when Reddit eliminated coins and the old awards ecosystem.