Post karma is the portion of a Reddit account's karma earned from upvotes on submissions, link posts, text posts, images, and videos, as opposed to comment karma, which comes from replies.
Why it matters
Many subreddits gate submission rights behind minimum post karma, and Automod rules often silently remove posts from low-karma accounts. For a SaaS founder, that means you can't launch a product thread, share a case study, or post a tool comparison in a niche community until the account has a track record of submissions people actually upvoted. Post karma is also a trust signal: mods and users check an account's profile before deciding whether a post is genuine or drive-by promotion.
How to use it
- Build comment karma first, it's lower-risk, then earn post karma with genuinely useful submissions (guides, breakdowns, honest questions) in smaller communities before posting in large ones.
- Check each target subreddit's rules and test with a neutral post; if it vanishes, an invisible karma threshold is likely the cause.
- Never buy karma or trade upvotes: purchased accounts and vote rings get detected and banned. A proper account warmup is slower but survives.
Related terms
Paul-Marie is the founder of Readyt, the Reddit growth platform for SaaS. He has generated 16K€+ in pre-sales in 2 months using nothing but Reddit, and now helps founders turn Reddit threads into their #1 acquisition channel.
