Reddit Character Counter

Reddit's Character Limits

300 characters for titles. 40,000 for text posts. 10,000 for comments. Reddit gives you room to write. The question is whether anyone will read it. (They will if you format it well. More on that below.)

The title is what gets you clicks though. 300 characters sounds like a lot, but shorter, punchier titles usually outperform longer ones. Get to the point.

What Works for Titles

• Be specific. "My cat did something funny" < "My cat learned to open the fridge and now steals cheese"
• Front-load info. Important stuff first. People skim.
• Match the subreddit. r/AskHistorians wants formal. r/memes wants casual.
• No ALL CAPS. Comes across as yelling. Also against rules in most subs.
• Skip clickbait. Reddit users HATE it. They'll downvote and call you out.

Format Your Posts (Seriously)

Reddit uses Markdown. Learn it. Walls of unformatted text don't get read. Use headers (# and ##), bullet points, **bold** for emphasis. Break up long posts. Well-formatted content gets more upvotes because people can actually parse it.

How Reddit Counts Characters Across Post Types

Text posts and link posts have the same 300-character title limit. But here's the trick - with link posts, your title is basically your entire pitch since people just see the link. With text posts you get 40,000 characters in the body, so your title can be more of a teaser.

Shorter titles dominate Reddit. Yeah, you have 300 characters available, but look at what actually hits the front page. Most winning titles are under 80 characters. Longer titles get truncated in the feed, especially on mobile. People see "This amazing thing happened and..." and never get to the good part.

Markdown formatting eats into your character count faster than you think. When you bold something with **text** you're using 8 characters, not 4. Links are worse: [click here](https://example.com) burns through 33 characters just for two words. This really matters for flair text where you only get 64 characters total.

Editing your post doesn't give you more characters. Some people think if they post and then immediately edit, they can sneak past the limit. Nope. The limit applies whether it's your first draft or your fifteenth edit.

Old Reddit vs new Reddit used to have different editors, but they share the same limits now. The fancy pants editor on new Reddit just makes formatting easier - you're still capped at the same character counts as old Reddit users working in markdown.

Reddit Posting Strategies That Actually Work

Character optimization barely matters if you ignore subreddit culture. r/AskHistorians wants scholarly titles with context. r/me_irl wants maximum meme energy in minimum words. Read the room before you craft your title.

Your title is everything on Reddit. I've seen brilliant posts die with 3 upvotes because of weak titles. Same content, better title, 10k upvotes. Front-load the hook. Put the interesting part first. "My grandma's response when I told her I'm getting divorced" beats "So I was talking to my grandma yesterday about some personal stuff and..."

Long posts need structure or people bail after the first paragraph. Use headers to break up sections. Bullet points for lists. A TL;DR at the top or bottom (subreddit preference varies). Bold the key points so people skimming can still follow your argument.

Comment karma hits different than post karma. Comments let you be more conversational, more detailed. A 3,000-character comment that really helps someone can blow up. But the same wall of text as a post? Dead on arrival. Different formats reward different approaches.

Walls of text get downvoted hard. I don't care how insightful your 8,000-word essay is - format it or watch it sink. Two-sentence paragraphs. Frequent line breaks. White space is your friend. Make it easy on people's eyes.

Frequently Asked Questions