What It Actually Takes to Post on Reddit: Karma and Account-Age Requirements Across the Top Subreddits, Measured

Your post was not rejected by a person. It was removed by a filter, in about a second, against a number nobody showed you.

TL;DR: We read the published rules of 100 of Reddit's most popular communities on 2026-09-09, through the public rules endpoint, with 100 of 100 requests succeeding. Six state a posting threshold with a number in it. Nine gate posting on the account without publishing a number, and seven of those nine apply only to self-promotion. Eighty-four say nothing on the subject and one has no rules defined. The only published karma floors are 10, 25, 50 and more than 100. The only published account-age floors are 1 day, 1 day, 7 days, 7 days and 45 days. None of that means the other 94 let everyone post: a threshold enforced by AutoModerator lives in a private wiki no endpoint exposes, so 84 measures what is published and never what is enforced.

Not affiliated with Reddit Inc. redditapis.com is an independent third-party REST proxy for Reddit's public API. This study is a measurement of what Reddit communities publish, taken with the same public endpoints anyone can call, and it says plainly where the measurement stops.

Why was my Reddit post removed automatically?

Because an automated filter evaluated your account before any human saw the post, and the account failed a check you were never shown. Three systems can do this, and they run in order:

• Reddit's sitewide spam filter. Platform level, not configured by the community, and the layer most likely to catch a brand new account posting an external link.
• The community's AutoModerator configuration. This is where a karma floor, an account-age floor, a domain blocklist or a keyword filter usually lives. It is written by the moderators of that community in a wiki page only they can read.
• Crowd control and similar community settings. Reddit's own moderator tooling, toggled per community, which can restrict participation from accounts with no history in that subreddit.

The removal you saw was almost certainly the second one. It happens within seconds, which is why the post appears to vanish while you are still looking at the confirmation screen.

Here is the part that makes this frustrating rather than merely annoying. The submit button does not check anything. Reddit accepts the submission, returns an id, and only then does the filtering happen. There is no dialogue that says you need 50 karma in this community, because the check runs after you have already written the post.

The person who put this most precisely is not a developer. It is a user in r/NewToReddit, in a thread that reached 191 upvotes at a 0.98 upvote ratio when we read it on 2026-09-09:

"Wouldn't it save everyone time if subreddits simply displayed minimum karma/account age requirements before someone tries to post? Right now, many users spend time writing a post only to instantly get hit with: 'Your post has been removed automatically.' I understand why anti-spam measures exist, but the lack of transparency can feel frustrating for normal users."

A 0.98 ratio on 191 votes is not a controversial opinion. It is a question the platform has not answered, and it is the question this post exists to answer with numbers instead of anecdotes.

Before the data, three quick diagnostics, because not every removal is a threshold and chasing the wrong one wastes days:

• The post vanished within seconds and you got no message. That is almost always an automated filter, and if your account is new or low-karma, an account threshold is the likeliest cause. This post is about that case.
• The post survived a while and then disappeared, or you got a message naming a rule. That is a content rule or a human moderator. Read the rule it named; it will be in the rules list, because content rules are the ones communities do write down.
• Your posts appear normal to you and nobody ever responds, anywhere. That is a different mechanism entirely and no per-community threshold explains it. We covered it in how to tell whether you are shadowbanned.

The first case is the one nobody can research in advance, and it is the one we measured.

What are the actual karma and account-age thresholds?

Across the 100 communities we measured, six publish a threshold with a number in it. That is the entire set, and here it is.

Four karma floors exist in the published data: 10, 25, 50 and more than 100. Five account-age floors exist: 1 day, 1 day, 7 days, 7 days and 45 days. Read those two lines carefully, because they are the honest answer to the question everyone asks. There is no platform-wide minimum karma to post on Reddit. Reddit does not set one. Every threshold you hit is chosen by the moderators of one community, and in this sample the published ones cluster low.

Two details in that table are worth pulling out.

The thresholds are not where you would look for them. Only two of the six sit in a rule named after the requirement. r/college calls its rule Account & Language Requirements and r/sysadmin calls its rule Account Age, so both are findable by scanning rule titles. The r/PiratedGames threshold is the last line of a rule called No spam or promotion, and the r/UkraineWarVideoReport threshold is clause 2.1 inside a rule called Posting rules. If you scanned rule titles looking for the word karma, you would miss both.

One community contradicts itself in public. r/CombatFootage states 25 karma in its rules endpoint. Its own sidebar description states 21 karma in one place and 25 karma in another, in the same text block. We recorded the rules-endpoint figure and are reporting the disagreement rather than picking a winner, because a reader trying to comply has no way to know which number the automation is actually using.

Notice what is not in that list. Sorted by subscriber count, 75 of the 100 communities we sampled are bigger than the largest of the six. The largest publisher is r/college at 2,933,273. The biggest communities on Reddit, the ones a new user is most likely to try first, publish nothing.

The six, one at a time

Six rows is small enough to read individually, and each one teaches something different about how a threshold gets written down.

r/college, 2,933,273 subscribers. The cleanest example in the sample. Rule 10 is named Account & Language Requirements and its description opens Minimums: Your account must be at least 1 week old with 10+ karma to participate. The rule is named after the requirement, the number is in the first sentence, and its kind field says all, so it covers comments as well as posts. If every community did this, this study would not exist.

r/CombatFootage, 1,978,549 subscribers. Rule 2, Making a link or text post, states both minima in one sentence: a minimum of 25 karma points and an account age of no less than 45 days. That 45-day floor is by a wide margin the strictest published age requirement in the sample, more than six times the next one. It is also the community that contradicts itself: the rules endpoint says 25 karma while the sidebar description says 21 karma under one heading and 25 karma under another. We recorded 25 and flagged the disagreement rather than resolving it, because a reader trying to comply cannot tell which figure the automation is checking against.

That contradiction is worth more than a footnote. Every other community in this study publishes one figure or none, so a reader can at least act on what they find. Here, a reader who complies with the sidebar's 21 and a reader who complies with the rules endpoint's 25 have both done exactly what the community told them, and one of them is going to be removed. We have no way to tell which, because the number the automation checks is not either of the ones on the page.

r/sysadmin, 1,319,747 subscribers. Rule 1 is literally titled Account Age and says your account must be 24 hours old to post. The violation reason repeats it, so a removal message here is self-explanatory. Twenty-four hours is a bot filter and nothing more: it stops an account created in the last minute and inconveniences nobody else.

r/PiratedGames, 1,152,438 subscribers. The threshold is the final line of rule 3, which is otherwise about spam and promotion: accounts younger than 7 days are not allowed to post or comment, stated as a bot-spam measure. Nothing in the rule's title suggests it carries an eligibility requirement. Scanning titles would miss it.

r/UkraineWarVideoReport, 937,173 subscribers. Clause 2.1 inside rule 2, Posting rules, requires a minimum of 50 karma points to post. Note the scope: posts only. Commenting is not gated by this rule, which is the difference between a community you cannot participate in and one you can participate in while you build up.

r/CuratedTumblr, 591,308 subscribers. Rule 11 is named Minimum karma and account age requirements and reads: you must have more than 100 karma to post, and you may not comment with negative comment karma or an account age less than one day. Three things are going on there. The karma floor is stated as more than 100, which is exclusive, so 101 is the first passing value. The one-day age bar and the negative-karma bar are stated for commenting, not posting. And it is the only community in the sample that publishes a rule about negative karma at all, which matters because negative karma locks an account out of far more than zero karma does.

Read across those six and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with the numbers: only two of the six put the requirement in a rule you could find by scanning titles. The other four buried it inside a rule about spam, about promotion, or about posting generally. A reader doing the obvious thing, opening the rules and looking for the word karma in a heading, finds two of six.

How the six break down by size

The size distribution of the six is the part we did not expect, and it inverts the intuition most people have.

The cleanest way to state it needs only one cut. Of the 51 communities in the sample at or above 5 million subscribers, zero publish a numeric threshold. Of the 49 below it, six do. Every published threshold in the sample sits in a community under 3 million subscribers, and the nineteen largest, all above twenty million, publish nothing between them.

There are at least two readings of that and we cannot distinguish them from this data:

• Large communities have more sophisticated automation and less need to explain it, so the threshold moves into AutoModerator and out of the rules.
• Large communities receive so much traffic that publishing a bar invites people to clear it exactly, so they deliberately do not.

Either way the practical consequence for a reader is identical, and it is the worst possible arrangement: the communities most likely to remove your first post are the ones least likely to have told you why.

What the rules endpoint publishes across 100 communities

Here is the distribution. It is the shape of the whole finding.

Six percent. That is how often one of Reddit's hundred most popular communities tells you, in a machine-readable rule, what your account needs before you write a post.

Three things about that chart are worth saying out loud before anyone quotes it:

• The 84 is a ceiling on visibility, not a count of open communities. It says nothing at all about enforcement, and we will spend a whole section on why.
• The 1 is kept separate on purpose. r/Home returned a successful response with an empty rules array. That is an absence of information, not a finding of no threshold, and merging it into the 84 would be quietly turning an unknown into a zero.
• The 9 is not nine barriers. Seven of the nine apply only to self-promotion, which we break down immediately below.

The nine in the middle class deserve that closer look, because reading them as nine general barriers would be wrong:

Seven of those nine restrict self-promotion or outbound links only. r/nba wants significant post history before you drop your own YouTube channel. r/Eldenring wants you participating in the community beyond your own content. r/ffxiv, r/classicwow, r/pics and r/Minecraft all say versions of the same thing about advertising. If you are asking a question or posting a picture in any of those, none of it applies to you.

Two apply to ordinary posting. r/interestingasfuck requires new users to post original content and routes all their submissions through mod approval. And r/dankmemes does this:

That rule is the single most useful sentence in the entire dataset, and we will come back to it, because it is the one place a community says out loud what most of the other 84 are doing silently.

The four communities that publish a threshold nowhere near their rules

This is the finding that reframes the headline number, and it is sharper than six of a hundred.

Four large communities in the sample state a real posting requirement in their sidebar description while their rules list says nothing about it at all.

Read the subscriber column. That is 47.3 million, 31.5 million, 26.9 million and 14.4 million. Between them they are four of the biggest communities a new user will encounter, and all four are counted NO_THRESHOLD_IN_RULES in our main figures, because our classification is scoped to the rules text.

So the honest version of the headline is two numbers, not one. A machine reading only the rules list sees 6 published thresholds. A machine reading the rules list and the sidebar description sees at least 10. The word "at least" is doing real work there: we classified all 100 rule sets formally, row by row, and read the sidebar text as corroboration without putting it through the same classification. Anyone repeating this should sweep both fields with equal rigour before treating the second figure as final.

The practical consequence is immediate. When you check a community, read both fields. The rules list is the obvious place and it is not where four of the largest communities put the information. r/anime's requirement, ten comment karma earned inside r/anime specifically, is a precise, actionable number sitting in a paragraph most people scroll past.

Look closely at how those four differ from each other, because they are not four instances of the same thing:

• r/anime publishes a number, and it is a subreddit-specific number. Ten comment karma earned inside r/anime. Your global karma total is irrelevant to it, and nothing on your Reddit profile displays the figure it is checking.
• r/gaming publishes a requirement with no number. some r/gaming Community Karma, which tells you the axis but not the bar, and then advises you to comment around before posting.
• r/news publishes a requirement that is not karma at all. An email-verified account. That is a one-time settings change rather than something you build over weeks, and it is the only account requirement of its type anywhere in our sample. Notably, the verified_email_required column is empty in all 100 rows of our rules data. Not one community in the sample states an email requirement in its rules, and r/news states one in its sidebar.
• r/videos publishes a description of the mechanism rather than a rule. Submissions from new users, and users with low karma, are automatically removed. That is a sentence about AutoModerator, written by moderators who evidently thought it worth explaining, and it appears in none of their ten rules.

One of those four is directly actionable in under a minute. If you have hit removals in r/news, check whether your email is verified in your Reddit account settings before you conclude anything about karma.

r/anime is the clearest single case, because it publishes an exact number and puts it in the field a rules-reading tool never opens:

Nothing in that is concealment. Somebody sat down and wrote Posting requires 10 comment karma from r/anime, which is more specific than most published rules manage. They put it in the About text. Fourteen rules sit alongside it and not one of them repeats it, so every tool ever pointed at this community reports no requirement, and so does every reader who does the obvious thing.

r/AskReddit publishes twelve rules and not one threshold

The contrast that carries this whole argument is one community against one rule.

r/AskReddit has 59,570,210 subscribers, which makes it the second largest community in our sample and 11.2 times the sample median. The largest is r/funny at 67,586,892, which is 12.7 times the median. The median itself is 5,330,760.5, the midpoint of the 50th and 51st communities at 5,323,353 and 5,338,168, so it is a computed midpoint rather than any community's actual count. It publishes twelve detailed rules. We re-queried it against the live API to be sure the count and the text were current, and they were. Not one of those twelve rules mentions karma or account age.

Rule 11 does mention karma, and this is exactly the trap that makes automated counting hard: it bans karma farming, which is a behaviour, not a minimum. A rule saying do not farm karma tells you nothing about how much karma you need.

Now hold that next to r/dankmemes, at 5,899,842 subscribers, whose rule is titled, verbatim, Yes, we have a karma threshold. Don't ask us about it. This rule literally explains everything.

One community has a threshold and says so while refusing to give the number. The other publishes twelve rules and says nothing, and every experienced Reddit user knows new accounts get filtered there anyway. The difference between them is not whether a gate exists. It is whether anyone told you.

That is the reason this study reports what is published and refuses to report what is enforced. The two are different quantities, the gap between them is unmeasurable from outside, and every table in this post keeps them apart.

It is worth sitting with the r/dankmemes rule a moment longer, because on a first read it sounds obstructive and on a second read it is the most useful thing any community in our sample did.

Compare the three postures available to a moderator team:

• Publish the number. Maximally useful to a reader, and it hands a spam operation an exact target. Six communities chose this.
• Confirm the gate and withhold the number. The reader learns that waiting and building karma is the right strategy here, and learns nothing that helps an adversary. One community chose this explicitly.
• Say nothing. The reader concludes there is no gate, tries, fails, and has no way to tell whether the cause was their account, their title, their link or their luck. This is the overwhelming default.

The middle option costs a moderator one sentence and it resolves the reader's actual question, which is not what is the number but is this about my account or about my post. Those need completely different responses. Knowing which one you are dealing with is most of the value, and it is available without publishing anything an adversary can use.

r/dankmemes phrases it rudely. It is still, by some distance, more informative than the twelve carefully written rules next to it that mention karma only to ban farming it.

Why "just build karma first" is the wrong answer

Go and read any thread about this and you will find the same reply pattern: your account is too new, go earn karma in a permissive community and come back. The advice is well meant, it is the most common answer given, and the evidence says it does not describe how this works.

A nine-year-old account with zero karma:

"I made this account ages ago but basically never touched it... Now I actually want to ask a question on a specific subreddit, but my posts get auto-deleted instantly by the spam filters."

That thread reached 458 upvotes and 71 comments when we read it on 2026-09-09. A five-year-old account with 8 karma, posted six months later:

"my account is 5yrs old, ive only gotten 8 karma... i try posting here n there but i always get removed"

259 upvotes. And a five-year account with 3 karma, 469 upvotes, saying the same thing in January: "I really want to post questions and discussion on subreddits that I'm interested in but I can't or they get automatically deleted because of my karma." Three separate long-lived accounts, all blocked, all for the same reason.

Here is why age does not help. A karma floor and an account-age floor are separate conditions, and most communities that enforce anything enforce karma. Look back at the published data: four of the six thresholds in our sample carry a karma number, and the two age-only rules, r/sysadmin at 24 hours and r/PiratedGames at 7 days, are both short enough that any account older than a week already clears them. An account-age gate is a bot filter with a one-week memory. A karma gate is a participation requirement with no expiry, and waiting does nothing against it.

The same reply pattern shows up outside Reddit. This is a founder discovering the rule the hard way, in a post that reached 233 likes and 15,277 views:

George Barnev

@gbarnev

Tried posting on Reddit. First post: removed. Second: removed. Apparently I need 75 karma to even post in the subreddit. So today I'm farming karma. Part of the job, I guess.

Note the number in that post: 75 karma. That figure appears in no published rule anywhere in our sample of 100 communities. He hit it, he knew it, and he could only have learned it from a removal message or from asking. That is direct corroboration of the AutoModerator point from a completely independent source.

Which karma actually counts

There is a second reason "just build karma" fails as advice, and it is that karma is not one number. It is at least three, and a rule almost never says which one it means.

Reddit tracks post karma and comment karma separately on every account. The PRAW client's account model documents both as distinct attributes, link_karma and comment_karma, which is the clearest public confirmation that the split is real at the data layer and not just a display choice. Your profile page shows both. A rule saying 10+ karma does not tell you which it is reading, or whether it is reading the sum.

Then there is a third kind that does not appear on your profile at all:

• Post karma. Accumulated from upvotes on your submissions. The hardest to earn from a standing start, because a low-karma account often cannot submit in the communities where posts do well.
• Comment karma. Accumulated from upvotes on your comments. The realistic path for a new account, because commenting is rarely gated.
• Subreddit-specific karma. Karma earned inside one community. Both r/anime and r/gaming gate on this in their sidebars, and nothing on your Reddit profile displays it. You cannot look up your r/anime karma. You can only infer it from your own comment history there.

That third category is the one that makes external tooling genuinely unable to help. A karma check against your global totals is straightforward: read your account, read the rule, compare. A karma check against a per-community total is not, because the figure is computed inside Reddit's moderation layer and is not returned on any public object. The public API reference documents no field for it, and neither does the PRAW source, which mirrors the response shape closely enough that a missing attribute there is strong evidence of a missing field upstream.

So when r/gaming says you need some r/gaming Community Karma, the honest summary is: there is a number, it is not published, it is measured against a quantity you cannot see, and the only instrument available to you is to comment there for a while and try again.

One practical consequence worth stating, because it changes what you should do. If a rule gives a plain number with no qualifier, as r/college and r/CombatFootage do, your combined karma is almost certainly what is being checked and comment karma is the cheapest way to raise it. If a rule names the community, as r/anime does, comments elsewhere do nothing for you at all.

The loop that makes karma hard to earn

Accept for a moment that building karma is the right advice. It is still harder than it sounds, and the people caught in it understand exactly why.

"Some communities required a certain amount of karma before being able to post in it, this is to avoid bots so it's understandable, however whenever you make posts elsewhere to be able to make that karma... you then bump into the issue of people commenting positively under your post but no one upvoting it."

Read the first clause again: this is to avoid bots so it's understandable. This is not someone complaining that the rules are unfair. It is someone who accepts the rule and is describing a mechanism failure inside it. Commenting and upvoting are different behaviours performed by different fractions of the audience, and karma only moves on the second one.

There is also a hole in the floor. Karma can go negative, and a negative-karma account is locked out of far more than a zero-karma one:

"I have -38 karma and I've been relegated to reddit karma hell I can't post anywhere without having my post removed"

r/CuratedTumblr is the one community in our sample that publishes a rule about this directly: you may not comment with negative comment karma. Every other community that enforces a negative-karma bar does it invisibly.

Negative karma deserves its own paragraph because it inverts the usual advice. At zero karma you are below some thresholds and above none, and the fix is to participate. Below zero you are additionally caught by rules written specifically about negative accounts, and participating is harder because the same behaviour that produced the negative total is likely still in play. Someone at -38 is not a week of commenting away from posting; they are in a different situation, and the honest answer for them is that the thresholds are the smaller of their problems.

There is a related trap worth naming, because it shows up constantly in the threads and it is the reason a lot of people conclude Reddit is rigged. A post that gets comments and no votes reads as popular to the poster and as invisible to the karma system. Four months in and still at 1 karma, in a thread that drew 199 upvotes and 128 comments, is not a sign that nobody read your posts. It is a sign that reading and voting are different acts, and only the second one moves the number the filter checks.

That thread's comment count, 128 against 199 upvotes, is quietly the best illustration of the whole problem in the dataset. A ratio like that means a lot of people had something to say and comparatively few pressed the arrow. The mechanism that failed the original poster is visible in the response to their post about it failing.

The pattern across the threads we sampled is worth stating as a measurement rather than an impression. We pulled 25 threads on this topic from r/NewToReddit on 2026-09-09, sorted by top over the past year with a minimum score of 100, and all 25 cleared that bar. Their dates span 2025-11-21 to 2026-08-11. This is continuous, not a spike. Twenty-one of the 25 are locked, which tells you those communities answer this question so often they close the threads.

What AutoModerator does that no endpoint can see

AutoModerator is Reddit's built-in automation bot. Every community configures it in a wiki page under its own moderator settings, and that configuration is where the real filtering usually lives: karma floors, account-age floors, domain blocklists, keyword filters, flair requirements and approval routing.

That wiki page is readable only by the moderators of that community. It is not exposed by any public endpoint, ours included, and no amount of API access changes that. It is not a gap in Reddit's documentation, it is a deliberate design choice: publishing the exact threshold is publishing the exact bar a spam operation needs to clear.

This is why our headline number is a ceiling on visibility and not a count of open communities. A subreddit in the NO_THRESHOLD_IN_RULES class is one of these three things, and from outside they are indistinguishable:

1. It genuinely has no threshold, and anyone can post.
2. It has a threshold configured in AutoModerator and simply never wrote it into a rule.
3. It has a threshold documented somewhere else, a wiki page or a pinned post, that the rules endpoint does not reach.

r/dankmemes is the proof that class two is real and not a hypothesis. Their rule confirms a threshold exists, then declines to state it. Every other community doing the same thing just does not have a rule about it.

We have one more piece of evidence that class two is common rather than rare, and it comes from outside Reddit entirely. The founder whose post appears earlier in this piece named a specific figure, 75 karma, needed to post in one subreddit. That number appears in no published rule in our sample of 100. He is not guessing; you do not arrive at 75 by intuition. He either read it in a removal message or was told it. Either way, a precise threshold existed, was enforced, was communicated to at least one person, and was published nowhere a reader could find it in advance.

It is worth being precise about what AutoModerator can check, because the range is wider than most people assume and it explains removals that look inexplicable:

• Account age, in any unit, evaluated at submission time.
• Karma, and it can be configured against combined karma, post karma, comment karma, or karma earned inside that community specifically.
• Verified email status, which is what r/news gates on.
• Domain, so an outbound link to a particular site is removed regardless of who posted it.
• Keywords, title format, flair, and post type, which is where most of the removals that have nothing to do with your account come from.

That list matters for diagnosis. If your post was removed and you have healthy karma and an old account, a karma threshold is not the explanation, and hunting for one wastes your time. A domain rule or a title-format rule is far likelier, and unlike a karma floor those are often written into the visible rules, because they are things a human can be pointed at for doing.

There is a second, quieter version of the same blind spot. Some communities publish rules whose entire body is a link:

r/AmItheAsshole is the sharpest case in the sample. It has a rule literally named Poster Requirements, and the entire content of that rule's description field is a URL. The endpoint tells you that poster requirements exist and then declines to tell you what they are. r/Steam does this for all ten of its rules, r/Overwatch for all nine, r/EscapefromTarkov for all eight.

Add those twenty-eight link-only rule bodies to the private AutoModerator configurations and the picture is consistent: the rules endpoint is a reliable index of what a community wants to be able to point at, and an unreliable index of what will actually stop your post.

How we measured this

All data was collected on 2026-09-09 through the redditapis.com REST API. No scraping, no web search, no other Reddit client at any point.

The sampling frame, stated plainly. The sample is the first 100 entries returned by GET /api/reddit/subreddits/popular at limit=100. That is Reddit's own popularity ranking, not a subscriber sort, and the difference is visible in the data: rank 1 is r/Home with 429,192 subscribers while rank 2 is r/AskReddit with 59,570,210. Sorting the collected rows by subscriber count produces a completely different order from the collection order.

So this is a sample of the 100 communities Reddit currently ranks most popular. It is heavily biased toward large, default-adjacent, English-language communities, with a median subscriber count of 5,330,760.5, the midpoint of the 50th and 51st rows sorted by subscribers. Nothing here generalises to all of Reddit. There are millions of subreddits, and small or niche communities, which is where restrictive karma gates are most often reported anecdotally, are almost entirely absent from this sample by construction.

The calls.

Collected 100 of 100 attempted on both endpoints, with zero call failures. Every subreddit attempted has a row. No subreddit was dropped.

One honest note on pagination. The single popular call returned all 100 in one page and no cursor was ever passed. The response's after value came back non-null, which means more pages exist beyond the 100 we asked for. The listing_status field, which is documented to appear when after is null, was therefore absent from the response. We are reporting that as absent rather than as complete. What we can assert is narrower and does not depend on it: we asked for 100 and received exactly 100 distinct communities in one page.

Cost: 201 metered calls at $0.002 each, which is 0.402 credits, roughly 40 cents. That is 1 popular call plus 100 rules calls plus 100 about calls, and it is the auditable figure. The account balance delta across the collection window was larger, because the key is shared with other work, so the call count is what we publish rather than the delta.

How rows were classified. Strictly on the rules endpoint text, meaning the rule name, its description and its violation reason, and nothing else. A row is THRESHOLD_PUBLISHED when a specific number gates posting or commenting on a property of the account. It is THRESHOLD_VAGUE when a rule gates on an account property without a number. It is NO_THRESHOLD_IN_RULES when neither appears.

The one RULES_UNAVAILABLE row. It is r/Home, and the call did not fail. It returned HTTP success with a well-formed body whose rules array was empty, plus the standard sitewide rules list. We classified that as unavailable because there was no rule text to read. If you would rather treat zero defined rules as a genuine finding of no threshold, the counts become 6, 9, 85 and 0. Both readings are stated so nothing rests on our judgement call. No other community in the sample returned zero rules.

What we deliberately did not count.

Every exclusion in that table is a judgement call and every one is flagged in the underlying dataset so you can reverse it. The last three rows matter most for anyone building this as a tool: a regular expression hunting for a number near the words karma, account or days will score all three as thresholds and inflate the published count. r/OldSchoolCool rule 1 says Must be 25 years old or more and it is talking about the photograph.

The self-promotion ratio exclusion is the one most likely to be argued with, so here is the reasoning in full. Ten communities in the sample publish a ratio: r/movies, r/gaming, r/Games, r/Overwatch, r/OnePiece, r/GlobalOffensive, r/cyberpunkgame, r/BaldursGate3, r/manga and r/discordapp, in forms including 9 to 1, 10 to 1, a 10 to 1 requirement and a cap on the share of your submissions coming from one source. Those are real constraints and people really do get removed for breaking them. They are not account thresholds, because they constrain the mix of what you post rather than who you are, and a ten-year-old account with a million karma is bound by exactly the same ratio as a one-day-old account. Nothing about waiting, or earning karma, changes your position against them. If we had counted ratios, the published number would be 16 rather than 6, and it would be answering a different question from the one the reader arrived with.

One row we came close to counting and did not: r/pcgaming publishes Any account less than 90 days old may be permanently banned on the first infraction of this rule. Ninety days is by far the largest account-age figure anywhere in the sample and it was tempting. It is not a posting threshold. It sets how severely a civility violation is punished for a young account, and a 30-day-old account can post there perfectly normally. We left age_min_days empty for that row deliberately, and it is the single row we would most expect a careful reader to reclassify, which is why it is called out here rather than buried.

Reproducing this. Everything above is two endpoints and a list of names. The sample came from one popular call at limit 100; if you want the same 100 names you should expect them to have moved, because that ranking is live. If you want the same communities rather than the same ranking, take the names from our table and request them directly. Then request rules and about for each, classify strictly on the rules text, and keep the sidebar findings in a separate column. Two hundred and one requests, about forty cents, and roughly the time it takes to make coffee.

If your counts differ from ours, the interesting question is not whether 6 is right today. It is which direction the difference runs. A higher published count means communities started writing thresholds into rules, which would be genuinely good news. A lower one means the opposite.

What this measurement cannot tell you

The dataset is direct evidence for exactly one proposition: how often a posting requirement is machine-readable in advance. Here is everything it is not evidence for.

• It does not measure enforcement. NO_THRESHOLD_IN_RULES means no threshold is published where the rules endpoint can see it. It does not mean no threshold exists, and the true enforced figure is unknowable from outside Reddit's moderator tooling.
• It contains no removal-cause evidence. We never called the posts endpoint. We collected no removal-reason strings, no moderator comments and no post ids. Nothing in this study speaks to why any specific real post was removed, only to what was published in advance.
• It is not a random sample of Reddit. It is the top of a popularity ranking, biased toward large English-language defaults. Small communities are absent by construction and are precisely where anecdote says the gates are tightest.
• It is a snapshot, not a history. The rules endpoint returns current text. A moderator can change any of these numbers tomorrow, and nothing here tells you what any rule said last year.
• Four communities publish rules whose body is a link, and we did not follow them. A threshold may sit behind any of those links.
• Subscriber counts drift. The figures here come from one atomic listing snapshot. Re-reading a community minutes later returns a slightly different number, and that is expected. Creation dates are stable and match exactly.

We would rather publish a narrow claim that holds than a broad one that does not. If somebody wants to falsify the six, the way to do it is to re-run the same two endpoints against the same 100 names and show a different count.

There are three measurements we would want next, and we are naming them because their absence is a real limit on what this post can claim, not because we are promising to run them.

• The same sweep over small communities. Anecdote consistently says niche subreddits gate harder than defaults, and our sampling frame cannot see that at all. A sample drawn from communities in the ten-thousand to hundred-thousand subscriber band would either confirm the pattern or kill it, and it would cost the same forty cents.
• A repeat of this sweep in six months. One snapshot cannot distinguish a stable state from a trend. If the published count moves from 6 toward 10 or higher, communities are choosing to publish, and that is a finding worth having. If it drops, the opposite.
• Something that measures enforcement rather than publication. This is the hard one and we do not have a clean design for it. Every approach we can think of either requires moderator access, which we do not have and should not have, or involves posting things to see what happens, which is exactly the behaviour these filters exist to stop. We would rather leave the gap open and labelled than fill it with a method we would not want somebody else to use.

That third bullet is the honest boundary of this whole piece. Everything here describes what Reddit communities have written down. The distance between what they have written down and what they enforce is real, it is probably large, and we have no instrument for it.

Why moderators set these gates at all

It is worth being fair here, because the case for thresholds is strong and the people running these communities are volunteers.

A large community receives a continuous stream of submissions from accounts created minutes earlier, most of them promoting something, and the alternative to an automated filter is a volunteer reading every one of them by hand.

Against that, a karma or account-age floor is the cheapest filter that exists against three real problems:

• Throwaway spam. An account created five minutes ago, posting a link, is the dominant spam pattern. A seven-day floor eliminates most of it at zero ongoing cost.
• Ban evasion. A user removed from a community can make a new account in seconds. A karma floor means the new account has to do real work first.
• Volunteer time. Every post a filter removes is a post a human does not read. Moderators are unpaid, and a large community can receive thousands of submissions a day.

Four properties make these particular filters unusually well suited to the job, and they are worth spelling out because they explain why nearly every large community ends up with some version of them:

• They are cheap. One configuration line, then zero ongoing effort forever.
• They are hard to game at low cost. Karma has to be earned somewhere, by an account behaving enough like a person to get upvoted.
• They target a pattern rather than a person. No judgement call is involved, so no accusation is implied and nobody has to handle an appeal.
• They degrade gracefully. Somebody who genuinely wants to participate clears them by participating, which is the outcome the community wanted anyway.

The users in these threads mostly say the same thing. The r/NewToReddit poster who articulated the catch-22 also wrote this is to avoid bots so it's understandable. The thesis-thread author wrote I understand why anti-spam measures exist. The complaint is opacity, not the rule.

There is also a real argument on the other side of publishing the number: a stated threshold is a stated bar for a spam operation to clear. r/dankmemes is being straightforward rather than obstructive when it says the threshold exists and refuses to name it. That is a defensible position and it is not the same thing as saying nothing at all.

The gap our data actually points at is narrower and much easier to close. Four of the largest communities in the sample already publish a threshold, in the sidebar, where the rules endpoint does not carry it. The information exists. It is just in the wrong field. That is a formatting problem, and it costs a moderator about ninety seconds to fix.

How to check a subreddit's requirements before you write the post

Here is the check, in order, for a human with a browser and no API key.

1. Open the community's rules. On desktop they are in the sidebar; on mobile, open the community menu and tap the rules entry. Read every rule title, then expand every description, because in four of our six published cases the threshold was buried inside a rule about something else.
2. Read the sidebar description separately. This is the block of text above or below the rules, the About section. Four of the biggest communities in our sample put their real requirement here and nowhere else.
3. Check the community wiki if there is one. Several communities in the sample point every rule at a wiki page. That is where the actual text lives.
4. Read your own account. Your profile shows post karma and comment karma separately, and your account creation date. Several rules in our sample specify which karma type counts, and a couple specify karma earned inside that community, which is different again and which nothing on your profile displays.
5. If you are still unsure, message the moderators. Modmail is the only reliable way to learn an unpublished threshold, and in our reading of these threads it is also the thing people are most reluctant to do. Moderators generally answer.

One more thing that costs nothing: read the removal message if you got one. The rules endpoint carries a violation-reason field, and a well-configured community's removal comment quotes it directly. If your removal said Account & Language Requirements, that is the name of r/college's rule 10, and the threshold is in its description.

A few specifics on step 1, because the rules are genuinely hard to read properly and most people do it wrong:

• Rule titles are not rules. On both the web and the apps, the rules list renders as collapsed titles. Four of our six published thresholds are in the description, not the title, so a collapsed list shows you nothing. Expand every one.
• The order is not importance. r/PiratedGames puts its age requirement in rule 3, r/CuratedTumblr puts its karma requirement in rule 11. There is no convention that eligibility rules come first.
• Watch for a rule that is only a link. If a community's rule bodies are all URLs, the rules list is a table of contents and the actual text is on a wiki page. Four communities in our sample do this for every rule they have.
• Check whether the rule covers comments too. Some thresholds apply to posts only, which means you can participate while you build up. r/UkraineWarVideoReport gates posts at 50 karma and does not gate commenting at all.

And on step 4, reading your own account: your profile shows post karma and comment karma as separate figures and your account creation date under the same heading. A rule saying 10+ karma with no qualifier is almost certainly checking the total. A rule naming the community, as r/anime's does, is checking something your profile does not display, and no amount of looking will surface it.

Reading the rules surface yourself

If you are checking more than a handful of communities, doing it by hand stops being reasonable. Two endpoints answer the whole question, and they are the same two this study used.

GET /api/reddit/sub/:name/rules returns the full rule list. Each rule carries the fields our classification read:

GET https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/sub/college/rules
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY

{
  "rules": [
    {
      "short_name": "Account & Language Requirements",
      "description": "Minimums: Your account must be at least 1 week old with 10+ karma to participate.\n\nEnglish Only: All posts and comments must be in English.",
      "violation_reason": "Account & Language Requirements",
      "kind": "all"
    }
  ]
}

The kind field is the one people miss. It says whether a rule applies to posts, to comments, or to both. r/UkraineWarVideoReport's 50-karma floor applies to posts only. r/college's applies to both.

GET /api/reddit/sub/:name/about returns the community metadata, including the description field that carried four thresholds the rules did not:

GET https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/sub/anime/about
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY

{
  "display_name": "anime",
  "subscribers": 14408391,
  "created_utc": 1201237816,
  "description": "... Posting requires 10 comment karma from r/anime. ..."
}

Read both. That is the single operational takeaway from this study. One call each, two tenths of a cent each, and the second one is where the information hides.

The pattern for a sweep is the one we ran: get your candidate list from GET /api/reddit/subreddits/popular or from your own list of names, then request rules and about for each, then search both text fields for the words karma, account age, days old and verified. Keep the two results in separate columns and never merge them, because "the rules say 10 karma" and "the sidebar says 10 karma" are different facts about how findable the requirement is. Full method in the rules endpoint walkthrough, and pagination behaviour if your candidate list runs past one page.

Four notes for anyone actually building this, all of them things we got wrong first:

• Search the rule name, the description and the violation reason, not just the description. r/sysadmin puts the whole requirement in the rule name. A matcher reading only descriptions misses it.
• Anchor on the account, not on the number. A regular expression for a digit near the word karma matches every anti-karma-farming rule in the sample, and there are at least five of those. It also matches r/leagueoflegends, whose 100 is a character count for post bodies, and r/mildlyinteresting, whose 100 upvotes is a repost exception. Match on the shape of the claim, not on the presence of a number.
• Run a negative control before you trust the count. Feed your matcher r/OldSchoolCool rule 1, Must be 25 years old or more. If it scores that as an account-age threshold, it is wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that inflates your published count. That rule is about the photograph.
• Rate-limit yourself even when you do not have to. If you are going direct to Reddit rather than through a proxy, the Data API Wiki documents the per-client request budget, and a hundred-community sweep run flat out is the kind of burst that gets a client throttled. We covered what a throttled response looks like separately.

The cost arithmetic is simple enough to do in your head. Two calls per community at $0.002 each is $0.004 per community. A hundred communities is 40 cents. A thousand costs four times that. There is no tier at which checking posting requirements is an expensive thing to do, which makes it slightly strange that nobody publishes the answer.

Two things this cannot give you, and it is worth being explicit because they are the two people ask for:

• Your own karma against the threshold. You read your account separately, through the user endpoint, and do the comparison yourself. There is no combined check.
• The AutoModerator configuration. Not exposed. Not by us, not by Reddit's public API, not by anything short of being a moderator of that community.

If you want the account side, what the user endpoint returns covers the karma fields, and getting a key takes about two minutes.

What to do if your post was already removed

Working assumption first: a removal is not a punishment and it is not permanent. A filter matched, and in most cases nothing was recorded against your account.

• Check whether it was removed or filtered. Open the post from your own profile. If you can see it and the community listing cannot, it was removed or is sitting in a queue. If it is genuinely gone from your profile too, that is a different situation.
• Check your inbox before you conclude anything. A removal notification, when a community sends one, arrives as a message rather than as a change to the post. Reddit's message surface is the same one PRAW exposes as the inbox, and if you have never checked it you may have been told the reason already.
• Read the removal comment. If there is one, it usually names the rule. The rules endpoint carries a violation_reason field, and a well-configured community's removal comment quotes it verbatim, so the string in your inbox is often the exact key to look up in the rules list.
• Do not immediately repost. Resubmitting the same content into the same filter produces the same result, and repeated attempts are themselves a spam signal.
• Check whether the rule even applied to you. Seven of the nine unquantified gates in our sample cover self-promotion only. If your post contained a link to something you made, you may have hit a promotion rule rather than a karma rule, and the fix is different.
• Message the moderators once, politely, asking what the requirement is. This is the step that actually resolves it, and it is the step people skip. In the threads we read, the users who got a straight answer are almost always the ones who asked.
• If nothing you post anywhere ever gets a response, the problem may not be per-community at all. Work through the shadowban checks instead.

Two things not to do, both of which come up constantly in these threads and both of which make the situation worse. Do not create a second account to get around a threshold, because that is the exact behaviour the filter exists to catch and it is a rule violation in its own right. And do not buy karma, for the same reason plus the obvious one.

The realistic path, in the order that actually works, is: comment in communities that do not gate commenting, comment on things you have something to say about, wait out any account-age floor while you do it, and re-check the specific community's two surfaces before writing the post. It is slower than anyone wants. It is also the only path that does not end in the same place a week later.

Some removals have nothing to do with karma. This one, at 309 likes and 13,533 views when we read it on 2026-09-09, is a content rule rather than an account rule:

Cap

@Cap1tology

Post removed for "asking for upvotes" (I linked a video I made about their subreddit and said thank you) https://t.co/ONqykPDxUN

The post was removed for asking for upvotes, after linking a video and saying thank you. Whether that reading is correct is between the poster and the moderators, but it illustrates the general shape: removal reasons are often specific, often surprising, and almost never explained before the fact.

And for the general experience of running into a rule stack you could not have anticipated, this is the joke version, at 217 likes, and it is funny because it is recognisable:

zoë bread

@zoebread

[post picture of funny sign i see to “pictures of funny signs you see” subreddit] POST REMOVED. PLEASE STUDY GROUP RULES. RULE 6: NO SHADOWS SHOULD BE VISIBLE IN PHOTO RULE 8: SIGN SHOULD BE PARALLEL TO ROAD RULE 17: SIGN IN QUESTION MUST CONTAIN NO MORE THAN ELEVEN VOWELS

There is a video walkthrough of the common removal causes that is worth ten minutes if you would rather watch than read:

How to Fix Post Getting Removed on Reddit (2026)

PurpleCircuit

What the 84 look like up close

It would be easy to read the 84 as a mass of communities that simply forgot to write a rule. They did not forget. Most of them have long, careful, specific rule sets. They are just about something else.

Take the largest few. r/funny publishes 10 rules. r/AskReddit publishes 12. r/worldnews publishes 12. r/gaming publishes 10. r/movies publishes 15. r/soccer publishes 15. r/leagueoflegends publishes 15. These are not neglected communities, and the rule counts across the whole sample run from 4 to 15, excluding r/Home which defines none at all, at a median of 11.

What those rules cover, consistently, is content:

• What may be posted, and in which format.
• Titles, tagging, spoilers and flair.
• Civility, harassment and brigading.
• Reposts, crossposts and duplicate submissions.
• Self-promotion ratios and advertising.

What they almost never cover is who may post. The rule set is written as a guide to behaviour for people who are already participating, and the question of whether you are allowed to participate at all is handled somewhere else entirely, by software, silently.

That is not a criticism. It is a structural observation about what a rules list is for. A rule exists to be pointed at when somebody breaks it, which means rules are written about things humans do wrong. An account-age floor is not something you do wrong; it is a condition you either meet or do not, and the enforcement is automatic. There is nothing for a moderator to point at.

Three sub-patterns inside the 84 are worth naming, because each one is a slightly different way for a real requirement to become invisible:

The behaviour rule that looks like a threshold. At least five communities in the sample ban karma farming: r/AskReddit rule 11, r/facepalm rule 8 (which bans spam accounts or accounts that farm karma), r/AITAH rule 5, r/PeterExplainsTheJoke rule 9, r/TikTokCringe rule 13. Every one of those mentions karma. None of them sets a minimum. A text search counts all five as thresholds and is wrong five times.

The requirement that lives in a wiki. Four communities publish rule bodies that are bare links, and one of them, r/AmItheAsshole, has a rule named Poster Requirements with a URL as its entire body. We did not follow those links, and we say so, because following them puts the study on a much less consistent surface. But the honest reading is that a threshold may well sit behind any of them.

The requirement that lives in the sidebar. The four we found, covering more than 120 million subscribers between them. Formally NO_THRESHOLD_IN_RULES, functionally not.

Put those together and the 84 splits into at least four situations that are indistinguishable through this instrument: genuinely open, silently gated by AutoModerator, documented behind a wiki link, or documented in the sidebar and missed by anyone reading only the rules. We can measure the last one because we read the sidebars. We cannot measure the other three at all, and we are not going to pretend a number we cannot compute.

A worked example: three communities, checked before posting

Abstract counts are easy to nod at and hard to act on. Here is the check run three times, on three communities from our sample that behave completely differently.

r/college, the easy case. Open the rules. Rule 10 is called Account & Language Requirements. Its description says one week old with 10 or more karma. Open your own profile: if your account is older than a week and your combined karma is at least 10, you are clear. Total time, under a minute, and you know the answer with certainty before writing anything. This is the case everyone assumes is normal. It is 6 of the 100 communities we read.

r/anime, the case that punishes rule-reading. Open the rules. Fourteen of them, covering spoilers, sourcing, fan art, piracy, self-promotion and clip formatting. Not one mentions karma. You would reasonably conclude there is no barrier. Now open the About text in the sidebar, and there it is: posting requires 10 comment karma from r/anime. That is a subreddit-specific figure. Your global karma is irrelevant, and there is no page anywhere that displays your r/anime karma to you. The only way to satisfy it is to comment in r/anime until enough of those comments have been upvoted, and the only way to know you have got there is to try posting again.

r/AskReddit, the case with no answer. Open the rules. Twelve of them, detailed and well maintained. Rule 11 mentions karma, and it bans farming it. Open the sidebar. Nothing about thresholds. By every public surface available to you, there is no barrier at all. Anyone who has tried to post there on a new account knows there is. There is no check you can run, no field you can read and no request you can make that resolves this. The correct answer to "what do I need to post in r/AskReddit" is: nobody outside that moderator team knows, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to guess a number.

Those three are the whole study in miniature. One community tells you plainly. One tells you if you know to look in the second place. One does not tell you, and no tool fixes that.

The pattern generalises into a decision you can actually make. If the rules carry a number, comply with it and you are done. If the sidebar carries one, comply with that. If neither does and your post gets removed, you have learned that a threshold exists and you have learned nothing about its value, and at that point messaging the moderators is not a last resort, it is the only remaining instrument.

If you are building a tool on this

A fair number of people will read this and want to automate the check. Here is what we learned building it, including the parts that are dead ends.

What you can build reliably. A per-community lookup that reads both the rules list and the About description, searches both for account-property language, and reports what it found with the surface it came from. That is genuinely useful, it costs two requests, and nobody currently ships it. The output should be three-valued: a published number, a published requirement with no number, or nothing found. Never two-valued.

What you can build with care. A comparison of your own account against a published threshold, for the plain-number cases. Read your account, read the rule, compare. The care is required because you have to decide which karma the rule means, and it usually does not say.

What you cannot build at all.

• A check against a subreddit-specific karma total. Two communities in our sample gate on this. The number is not on any public object.
• A read of the AutoModerator configuration. Moderator-only, by design, and not going to change.
• A prediction of whether a specific post will be removed. Removal depends on the content, the account, the community configuration and Reddit's own spam scoring, and you can see one of those four.

The three failure modes that will bite you, all of which bit us:

1. Reporting an unfound threshold as no threshold. This is the big one and it is a design decision, not a bug. If your tool prints no requirements for r/AskReddit, your tool is confidently wrong about the largest community on the platform. Print none published and mean it.
2. Matching on numbers instead of on claims. Covered above, but the failure is worth restating: a digit near the word karma matches five anti-farming rules, a character-count rule, a repost exception and a rule about how old a photograph has to be.
3. Collapsing not-stated into zero. If your schema uses 0 for a missing threshold, then r/sysadmin, which publishes an age requirement and no karma requirement, appears in your data as a community requiring zero karma. That is a fabricated data point, and there are six of them waiting for you in a table this size.

The general principle underneath all three is the same one that shaped this whole study. The instrument reads publication. It does not read enforcement. Every honest output has to carry that distinction all the way to the surface, because the moment it gets flattened into a single boolean, the tool starts lying in the reassuring direction.

What the search results say about this problem

We pulled the live United States search results for the query reddit post removed on 2026-09-09. The composition is itself a finding.

Eight of the top ten results are Reddit threads. Two from r/help, three from r/NewToReddit, one from r/modhelp, one from r/ModSupport, one more. One result is a Quora question. One is a YouTube video. Exactly one editorial page ranks, and it answers a different question, namely how to view deleted posts rather than why a post was removed.

Every ranking result is a person asking. Not one is an answer.

That is not laziness on anyone's part. It is structural: answering the question properly means querying subreddit rules and metadata at scale, and the people asking the question do not have API access. The question stays open because the tooling to close it sits on the other side of the thing being asked about.

"The sub says I need to have an old enough account. Can I know in advance how old the account needs to be?"

148 upvotes. The answer, for the 100 communities we measured, is: probably not, and here is exactly how often you can.

There is a second thing the search results show, which is what the question is actually about. Look at the phrasings that rank: why was my post removed, why do my posts keep getting removed, first time using Reddit, why was my post instantly removed, understanding automatic post removal, posts are getting removed by Reddit's filters. Five different people, five different years, and every one of them is describing the same twenty seconds: they wrote something, they submitted it, and it was gone before they finished reading the confirmation.

Nobody in that list is asking how Reddit's moderation architecture works. They are asking what they did wrong. That is why an article about how to view deleted posts can rank for this query while answering a different question entirely: the search intent is emotional before it is technical, and a page that acknowledges the feeling ranks alongside pages that address the mechanism.

We are trying to do the second thing without being dismissive about the first. The short version, for anyone who arrived here after a removal and does not want the data: you almost certainly did nothing wrong, the filter is not a judgement about you or your post, and the specific number it checked was probably never published anywhere you could have found it.

Five mistakes people make reading this data

Including two we had to actively avoid making ourselves.

• Reading 84 as permissive. It is not a count of communities that let anyone post. It is a count of communities that publish nothing on the subject, and the two overlap by an unknown amount.
• Merging RULES_UNAVAILABLE into NO_THRESHOLD_IN_RULES. One is an absence of information and the other is information saying nothing. We report the alternative count so you can make that merge yourself with your eyes open.
• Counting anti-karma-farming rules as karma minimums. A rule saying do not farm karma is about behaviour. It appears in r/AskReddit, r/facepalm, r/AITAH and several more, and a naive text search counts every one of them as a threshold.
• Treating a self-promotion gate as a general barrier. Seven of our nine vague rows apply only to advertising your own content. Reading them as nine general barriers overstates that class by a factor of four.
• Writing 0 where the honest value is not stated. No community in this dataset published a threshold of zero. Every empty cell means the rule does not say, and collapsing those into zeros would invent six data points.

What 2026 changed, and what to watch

Three shifts matter for anyone trying to answer this question programmatically now rather than three years ago.

• The public data surface narrowed. Reddit's 2023 API changes ended the era of free bulk access, and the Data API Terms now govern programmatic collection. Reading the rules and about surfaces for a hundred communities is still entirely routine, and it is what this study did, but it is now an authenticated, metered operation rather than an anonymous one.
• Community automation moved to the Developer Platform. Reddit's developer documentation is where community apps are built now, and moderator tooling has grown steadily more capable. None of that made threshold configuration public, and nothing suggests it will: publishing the exact number publishes the exact bar to clear.
• The demand did not go anywhere. The 25 threads we sampled span 2025-11-21 to 2026-08-11, all clearing 100 upvotes, with 21 of 25 locked by moderators who have answered this too many times. This is not a spike tied to a policy change. It is the steady-state cost of a filter that runs after you press submit.

There is a fourth change that is harder to date and easier to feel. Reddit's own interface has been steadily better at telling you a post was removed and steadily no better at telling you why. A removal notification is a good thing and it is more than you used to get. It still routes you to a rules list that, in 94 of the 100 communities we measured, does not contain the rule you broke.

The thing worth watching is whether the sidebar becomes the de facto place these requirements live. Four of the largest communities in our sample have already put them there. If that is a trend rather than a coincidence, then any tool that reads only the rules endpoint is going to keep getting the answer wrong, and getting it wrong in the same direction: too optimistic. We covered reading the moderator and wiki surfaces separately, and what the rules of automation look like from the bot side if you are building something that posts.

Verdict

The answer to "how much karma do I need to post on Reddit" is that there is no platform answer, and for 94 of the 100 most popular communities there is no published community answer either.

What we can say precisely, from 201 requests on 2026-09-09 with zero failures:

• 6 of 100 publish a posting threshold with a number, in their rules. The karma floors are 10, 25, 50 and more than 100. The age floors are 1 day, 1 day, 7 days, 7 days and 45 days.
• 9 of 100 gate posting on the account without a number, and 7 of those 9 apply only to self-promotion or outbound links.
• 84 of 100 publish nothing on the subject, and 1 has no rules defined at all.
• At least 10 of 100 publish a threshold once you also read the sidebar description, which is where four of the largest communities in the sample put theirs.

And the thing that matters more than any of those counts: none of this measures enforcement. A threshold configured in AutoModerator is invisible to every public endpoint, r/dankmemes confirms in its own rule text that exactly that arrangement exists, and a founder on X named a 75-karma requirement that appears in no published rule we found. The real number of communities gating on karma is higher than 6, higher than 10, and unknowable from outside.

Which leaves the practical advice short. Read the rules and the sidebar before you write. Read your own karma and account age. If neither surface says anything and your post disappears, message the moderators rather than reposting. And if you are building anything that checks this at scale, read both fields, keep them in separate columns, and never report an empty cell as a zero.

The information mostly is not hidden on purpose. In four of the biggest communities on Reddit, it is simply in the wrong field. That one is fixable.