Paste a username and this tool returns total, post and comment karma, public post and comment counts, first seen date and last active date, all read from a data provider's archive of public content. First seen is a floor on account age, not the true age: the account can be older, it just has no public activity before that date. A shadowban is not something this tool or any lookup like it can detect, so if the result comes back empty, the real check happens in a private browser window.
How to use it
Type the username with or without "u/" and hit enter or click "Check the account." You get one of two outcomes: a panel of numbers for an account with public activity, or a note saying "no public activity found" with four reasons listed underneath.
If the account looks empty, open the profile in a private browser window. This is the one step the tool cannot do for you, and it is the only reliable way to tell a shadowban or suspension apart from an account that is simply new, private, or has never posted.
When the account is found, here's what each field shows:
Total karma is post karma plus comment karma combined, matching the number Reddit displays on an account's profile.
Post karma and comment karma are separate because they reflect different usage patterns on the platform. Post karma comes from shares and submissions people upvoted. Comment karma comes from responses to other people's posts. The ratio between them tells you more than either number alone.
Public posts and public comments are counts of the content this lookup can see, which is a data provider's archive, not a live crawl of Reddit. An account that deleted old posts or that has a mostly private history will show a lower count here than its real lifetime activity.
First seen is the date of the earliest public post or comment the archive has for this account. It is a floor, not a birth certificate. Reddit shows a cake day on the profile itself, and that date can be earlier than first seen, especially for an account that lurked for months or years before ever posting.
Account age is shown as "at least N days," calculated from first seen to today. Read it as a minimum, never as the exact age.
Last active is how long ago the archive last saw a public post or comment from this account. An account with no post in six months is not necessarily dead. It might just be quiet, or posting somewhere the archive has not indexed yet.
If the lookup comes back with no public activity, the panel lists four reasons: the name is misspelled, the account has never posted or commented, the profile is set to private, or Reddit is hiding it because it is suspended or shadowbanned. This tool cannot tell those four apart. It reads a public archive, and all four reasons produce the same empty result. The section below covers how to check which one it is.
Karma and age are about whether an account is allowed to post at all. Timing is a separate question: once you know an account can post, the best time to post checker shows when a specific subreddit is reading, so a first reply lands somewhere other than an empty thread at 3am.
Why karma and age matter to a founder
Most subreddits that let people talk about their own product still gate who gets to post. The subreddit rules checker shows account age and karma minimums showing up constantly in the rules I've pulled from hundreds of communities. Common thresholds are 30 days of account age and somewhere between 50 and 100 karma. Some communities publish the exact figure in their rules. Others enforce a threshold quietly through Reddit's own mod tooling without saying the number out loud, which is by design: Reddit's help center for moderators notes the platform deliberately doesn't publish per-subreddit thresholds to make the gate harder to game. Either way, an account that appeared last week with single-digit karma gets auto-removed or shadow-filtered by the subreddit's own settings before a moderator reads the comment. Check the exact gate for a specific community with the subreddit rules checker. This tool tells you where your account stands against gates like those.
Age and karma matter past the automated gate too. A moderator deciding whether to leave up, remove, or ban a promotional comment almost always clicks through to the commenter's profile. An account with a year of ordinary comments across multiple communities reads like a person who happens to run a business. An account with three days of history and one comment linking to a product reads like a marketing drop, and gets treated as one, rules or no rules.
Reddit's own reddiquette draws the line as being a redditor with a website, not a website with a Reddit account. Fine to have a business and mention it sometimes. Not fine to exist on Reddit only to mention it. Karma and account age are the crude, visible proxy for that line. They don't prove someone is a genuine participant, but their complete absence does prove the opposite.
How to check for a shadowban properly
A shadowban, in the term Reddit users still use even though Reddit itself moved away from that word years ago in favor of account suspensions with a visible notice, means the account can still post and comment, and the person posting can see their own content when logged in, but nobody else can. That is what makes it hard to self-diagnose. Everything looks normal from inside the account.
The test that works: open a private or incognito browser window, one where you are not logged into Reddit, and go to reddit.com/user/ followed by the username. A suspended or shadow-filtered account shows a page that cannot find the profile. A normal account shows the profile, karma and all, same as this tool would report if it has public activity in the archive.
That one check separates three different situations that all look identical from the account owner's side. A shadow-filtered or suspended profile is invisible to a logged-out viewer, even though the account owner sees everything as normal. A private profile is also invisible to a logged-out viewer, but it is a choice the owner made, not a penalty. A new or inactive account simply has nothing posted publicly yet.
If the private window confirms the account cannot be found, Reddit's help center has the path to appeal a suspension, starting from the account status overview article, which explains the different states an account can be in and links to the ban notice and appeal process.
This is why the tool reports "no public activity found" instead of guessing. It reads a data provider's archive of public Reddit content. That archive doesn't distinguish between "Reddit hid this account" and "this account never posted." Both return zero results. Calling one of them a shadowban would be right about half the time by chance and wrong the other half, in a way no one could verify since the archive can't see Reddit's internal state. Reporting the honest limits of the data and pointing to the one check that works seemed better than pretending to know what the lookup cannot know.
Reading the numbers
Post karma and comment karma measure different habits. The ratio between them tells you more than either alone.
High post karma with low comment karma means shares and submissions that got upvoted, with rare replies to others' posts. This pattern is common for accounts built around sharing content: blogs, side projects, meme accounts. It's also the exact shape of accounts built only to drop links. A moderator can't tell the difference from numbers alone, which is why they check the actual comment history, not just the karma total.
Steady comment karma built across different threads over months signals someone reading Reddit and responding to what other people wrote. That pattern survives a founder pitch because it shows the account was doing something on Reddit before the product existed to mention.
For your own founder account before the first reply anywhere, look for real comment history that predates any product mention, not just a karma total. A thousand karma from one viral post six months ago matters less to a moderator than two hundred karma spread across forty ordinary replies. Check a draft against a specific subreddit's rules with the reddit reply checker once you have something written. It flags the same things a moderator would flag before you post it.
Building a founder account that survives a pitch
The account that mentions a product successfully is usually the one that was already a normal participant before having anything to sell.
Comment on threads unrelated to your product first. There's no fixed number of days that guarantees anything, but an account with zero history and one promotional comment is the easiest pattern for both automod and human moderators to catch. Answer good threads with no mention of your product even when the community doesn't allow self-promotion. Building history that way is the only foundation for a later pitch that will work.
Disclose affiliation when you mention the product. Say you built it. An account that poses as an unaffiliated happy user, then gets exposed, causes more damage than a disclosed mention that a moderator removes for being off-topic. Post one pitch per subreddit, then step back from that community for a while before mentioning the product there again. Spamming the same pitch across a dozen threads in one subreddit in one day is the volume pattern that gets accounts banned, not the mention itself.
Never auto-post and never rent accounts. An account that posts on a schedule, or an account bought or borrowed to post through, both fail the same test moderators and Reddit's systems are built to catch: a person participating doesn't behave that way. Radar drafts replies but never posts them. Everything gets pasted by hand, under your own name, because that's the only way the account behind it stays yours in every sense that matters. More on why in why I built Radar.
To find where a product fits before saying anything, Scan my site free runs the same read-your-site, find-the-communities, show-you-the-threads process Radar runs for every product on it.
Where the data comes from and what it misses
This lookup reads a licensed commercial data provider's archive of public Reddit content. It doesn't log into Reddit, doesn't use the official API, and doesn't ask for or store passwords or sessions. Results for a username are cached for a few hours, so a second lookup shortly after the first is fast but may not reflect the last few hours of activity.
Private profiles come back empty because the archive has nothing public to show, and this tool reports it the same way it reports a suspended or shadow-filtered account: no public activity found. Hidden accounts also come back empty, since suspended and shadow-filtered accounts are, by definition, hidden from public view, so the archive has nothing to read either. A cake day before the first public post is invisible here. Reddit knows the exact date an account was created, but a public content archive only knows the date of the earliest post or comment it has on file. An account created and lurked for a year before posting shows a first seen date months later, and there is no way for this tool to know the difference.
Nothing searched here is stored. No login is required, and no username is saved beyond the short cache window for repeat lookups.
This isn't a workaround for Reddit's own tools. It's a public-data mirror, useful for a quick read on an account before deciding whether to reply or trust what you're looking at, not a replacement for Reddit's account settings or moderator tools.
FAQ
Does this tool detect shadowbans?
No. It reads a public content archive, and a shadowbanned account produces the same empty result as a private profile or an account that has simply never posted. The only reliable check is to open the profile at reddit.com/user/username in a private or incognito browser window while logged out. If the profile cannot be found there, the account is suspended or shadow-filtered. If it loads normally, it is not.
How much karma do I need to post in a subreddit?
It depends entirely on the subreddit; there is no single Reddit-wide number. Many communities that allow any self-promotion at all ask for something in the range of 30 days of account age and 50 to 100 karma, based on the rules I have pulled and audited across roughly a thousand communities, but plenty of subreddits set a different bar, or enforce one quietly without publishing it. Check the specific community with the subreddit rules checker before you post.
Why does "first seen" not match the account's real age?
First seen is the date of the earliest post or comment in the data provider's public archive, not Reddit's own account creation date. An account can lurk, read without posting, for months or years before its first public post. First seen only tells you the account is at least that old, never exactly how old.
The tool says "no public activity found" for an account I know posts regularly. Why?
Check the spelling first; a single wrong letter returns an empty result. If the spelling is right, the account may have a private profile, or the archive has not indexed its recent activity yet. Open the profile in a private browser window to see what a logged-out visitor sees.
Does this tool store the usernames I look up?
No login is required, and nothing is stored beyond a short cache that makes a repeat lookup of the same username faster for a few hours. There is no account, no history page, and nothing tied to who ran the search.
What karma and age should my own founder account have before I reply to a thread with a product mention?
There is no universal number, since every subreddit sets its own bar or none at all. What matters more than any single figure is real comment history that predates the mention: an account that has been answering questions in the same communities for weeks reads very differently to a moderator than one with a single day of history. Check where your product fits and what a first reply should look like with Scan my site free.