Your Karma & Reputation
Your karma balance and trust score are the two main signals of your standing in the community.
Your Karma & Reputation
Your karma balance and trust score are the two main signals of your standing in the community.
Your Karma Balance
Visible on your profile and dashboard.
What it represents: A ledger of your participation. Karma flows to everyone involved in a completed exchange — both the person who helped and the person who asked. Asking for help is a contribution too: it creates the opportunity for someone else to give.
What affects it: Both sides of a completed exchange earn karma. The community sets the split — by default, helpers earn slightly more, but requesters earn karma as well. The amount also depends on the request type's community multiplier.
What it doesn't mean: A low balance doesn't mean you're a bad member — karma isn't a debt you owe. It reflects how active you've been, not whether you've been giving or taking.
Your Trust Score
Reflects your standing in the community's social graph.
How it's built: Every completed request creates a trust connection. Trust grows through repeated interactions with the same people (depth) and interactions across many people (breadth).
How it's used: Shown on your profile, factors into feed visibility and request prioritization.
Karma Decay
Both your karma and trust score decay when you're inactive. The decay rate is set by your community (the half-life).
As long as you're participating, decay doesn't apply. If you take a break and come back, your score will have dropped — but it's fully recoverable through normal participation.
How to Grow Your Karma
- Help others regularly — this is the direct path
- Choose higher-multiplier request types — check which types your community values most
- Be consistent — regular participation beats sporadic bursts
How to Grow Your Trust Score
- Help the same people more than once — builds depth
- Help many different people — builds breadth
- Never accept requests you can't complete — cancellations damage trust
- Stay active — trust decays with inactivity
Multiple Communities
Karma and trust are tracked separately in each community you belong to. Build reputation in each through participation there.