The best AskReddit questions are not random strokes of genius. When we crawled 995 of the highest-scoring r/AskReddit posts in July 2026 and sorted them into patterns, a small set of repeatable question formulas accounted for nearly all of the top 100, and the data even shows which formulas earn upvotes and which earn comments. The best AskReddit questions are ones every reader can answer instantly from their own life, phrased so that voting or commenting feels like joining the joke, the debate, or the story.
Key takeaways
- Proposal questions ("How would you feel about...") posted the highest median score in our top 100 at 120,837, but the fewest comments, with a median of just 4,447.
- Open elicitation questions ("What free things online should everyone take advantage of?") flip that: the lowest median score of the major formulas at 97,468, but the most comments at a median of 16,667.
- The "What / What's" family opens 44.8% of all 995 posts in our pool, yet plain "What" opens only 16% of the top 100. "How" openers are three times overrepresented among winners.
- Winning titles run long: the median top-100 title is 117.5 characters versus 87 for the full pool.
- 87 of the 100 highest-scoring posts date from 2019 to 2021. Benchmark against the past-year listing, not the frozen all-time leaderboard.
- 94 of the top 100 titles contain a question mark, and 75 speak directly to the reader with "you" or "your".
What did we analyze?
In July 2026 we crawled 34,095 posts across 50 subreddits from Reddit's public listings. This study uses the r/AskReddit slice of that crawl: 995 posts total, 499 from the subreddit's public all-time top listing and 496 from its past-year top listing. Everything below comes from that dataset.
Scores are the net upvote counts Reddit displays publicly, which Reddit deliberately fuzzes, so treat every figure as Reddit's displayed number at crawl time rather than a vote-perfect count. Opener-word and title-length statistics cover all 995 posts. The formula breakdown covers the 100 highest-scoring posts in the pool, which ranged from 92,092 to 221,995 in score with a median of 104,102 upvotes and a median of roughly 10,700 comments.
Why AskReddit? It is Reddit's second-largest community, at 58.7 million subscribers as of June 2026 according to Linkeddit's live subreddit counts, behind only r/funny, and 2026 Reddit statistics roundups put it at over 3,000 new posts per day. Your question is not competing with silence. It is competing with thousands of other questions posted the same day, which is exactly why formula matters. You can replicate the raw-material step of this study yourself: pull the current top titles from any subreddit with our free subreddit title scraper.
Which AskReddit question formulas win?
Seven repeatable formulas cover 94 of the 100 highest-scoring AskReddit posts in our crawl. The other 6 are not questions at all: they are memorial and crisis posts (celebrity deaths, a suicide prevention megathread) that you cannot and should not try to replicate, so we excluded them from the formula advice.
| Formula | Posts in top 100 | Median score | Median comments | The reader's job |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Second-person scenario ("You wake up and...", "What if...") | 22 | 104,196 | 12,135 | Imagine themselves in it |
| Open elicitation ("What's the best/worst/most X?") | 21 | 97,468 | 16,667 | Contribute an answer |
| Proposal reaction ("How would you feel about a law/feature that...") | 17 | 120,837 | 4,447 | Vote agree or disagree |
| Group callout ("People who X, why/how...?") | 14 | 100,390 | 10,174 | Self-identify and testify |
| News springboard (real event + question) | 12 | 115,538 | 11,462 | React while it's relevant |
| Quote springboard ("[Famous person] said X. What's your Y?") | 6 | 109,076 | 9,822 | Riff on the quote |
| Reddit meta (about Reddit itself) | 2 | 139,506 | 20,865 | Bond over shared context |
| Not a question (news/memorial) | 6 | 101,928 | 13,010 | Pay respects |
Formulas that harvest agreement (proposals) top the score column and bottom the comment column; formulas that can only be answered in the comments (elicitations) do the reverse. Bars scaled per panel.
A few patterns behind the table. The single most repeated exact phrasing in the top 100 is "How would you feel", which opens 14 of the 100 posts on its own. The number one post in our entire crawl is a group callout with a built-in punchline: "People who haven't pooped in 2019 yet, why are you still holding on to last years shit?" at 221,995 displayed upvotes. And the reader's job column is the real lesson: every winning formula makes participation effortless. Nobody needs expertise, research, or even a strong opinion to respond.
Should you optimize for upvotes or for comments?
Pick your formula based on which currency you actually need, because our data shows the two do not travel together. Proposal reactions had the highest median score of any formula in our top 100 (120,837) and the lowest median comments (4,447). Open elicitations were the exact mirror: the lowest median score of the major formulas (97,468) and the highest median comments (16,667).
The mechanics make sense once you see it. A proposal question like "How would you feel about a law that requires people over the age of 70 to pass a specialized driving test?" is answered by the vote itself. Upvoting is agreeing, so the post harvests upvotes and leaves relatively little to say. An elicitation like "What life changing item can you buy for less than $100?" cannot be answered with a vote at all. The only way to participate is to comment, and that thread pulled 43,748 comments in our crawl.
Across the whole top 100, the median post earned roughly one comment for every ten upvotes. Formulas that beat that ratio are discussion engines. Formulas that fall below it are agreement engines. So the question is not "what is the best AskReddit question", it is "what do I need this post to produce":
- Building post karma fast or warming an account? Proposal reactions and second-person scenarios give the biggest score-per-effort. This pairs with the approach in our Reddit karma farming guide.
- Building comment karma, or an account history that looks like a genuine conversationalist? Post an open elicitation, then reply in your own thread while answers flood in.
- Testing content ideas or mining audience language? Elicitations again. The comments are the product.
What word should an AskReddit question start with?
The most common opener is not the winning opener. Across all 995 posts, the "What / What's" family dominates the starting position: plain "What" opens 30.5% of posts, and the "What's" contraction adds another 14.3% across its two apostrophe spellings, for a combined 44.8%. But in the top 100, plain "What" opens just 16% of posts, and "What's" does not even appear among the ten most common openers.
| Opener | Share of all 995 posts | Share of top 100 | Signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| What / What's family | 44.8% combined | 16% (plain "What"; "What's" at 1% or less) | Massively overused, underrepresented at the top |
| How | 5.1% | 16% | 3x overrepresented among winners |
| If | 4.9% | 6% | Slightly overrepresented |
| You | 2.5% | 5% | 2x overrepresented |
| You're | not in the pool's top ten (1.4% or less) | 4% | Strongly overrepresented |
| People | 5.0% | 4% | Roughly at base rate |
| [Serious] | 1.7% | 1% | Common tag, rare at the very top |
Our read, clearly labeled as interpretation: "What's your favorite X" is the default mental template for an AskReddit question, so the pool is flooded with it and any single "What" post fights the most crowded lane. "How", "If", "You" and "You're" openers signal a proposal or a scenario, the two formulas that dominate the score table above. The [Serious] tag is interesting too: it is frequent enough to be a top-ten opener across the pool, yet only one [Serious] post cracked the top 100. Serious threads have their place, but stripping out jokes appears to cap the ceiling.
None of this means "What" questions fail. It means that if you use one, the specificity has to carry it, because the opener will not.
How long should an AskReddit title be?
Longer than you think. The median title across all 995 posts is 87 characters. The median title in the top 100 is 117.5 characters, about 35% longer, and the gap widens at the extremes: the 90th percentile is 156 characters pool-wide versus 213.7 characters in the top 100.
| Percentile | All 995 posts | Top 100 |
|---|---|---|
| 25th | 63 chars | 78.5 chars |
| Median | 87 chars | 117.5 chars |
| 75th | 121 chars | 169.5 chars |
| 90th | 156 chars | 213.7 chars |
The reason shows up when you read the winners. On AskReddit the title is the content. A scenario needs room to set the scene, a proposal needs room to spell out the rule, and a punchline needs a setup. The correlation is not a command to pad, and this is one place our data is genuinely inconclusive on causation: longer winners might win because length allows a complete premise, or complete premises might simply tend to run long. Either way, cutting a good setup to hit some imaginary "short titles win" rule is not supported by anything in this dataset. Two more structural notes from the top 100: 94 of the 100 titles contain a question mark, 75 address the reader directly with "you" or "your", and only 6 carry an NSFW flag. Edgy humor wins on this subreddit. Explicit does not need to.
Why is the all-time top 100 stuck in 2020?
Because the leaderboard is a time capsule. Of the 100 highest-scoring posts in our crawl, 87 were posted between 2019 and 2021, and 51 in 2020 alone. Only 3 posts from 2022 or later made the cut, and just 1 from 2025.
That era was a perfect storm: pandemic lockdowns, record time on site, and a voting culture that pushed multiple question posts past 150,000 displayed upvotes. Our pack does not break out the past-year listing's scores separately, so we cannot quantify exactly how far below that era today's winners land. What we can say is that 496 of our 995 posts came from the past-year top listing, and almost none of them reached top-100 territory.
The practical consequence: never benchmark your post against six-figure legends, and read lists of the most upvoted Reddit posts of all time as history, not as targets. Your real competition is whatever is winning on AskReddit this month, which is another reason to scrape current top titles rather than studying a frozen leaderboard.
How do you write a top-scoring AskReddit question?
Work the checklist that the data supports, in order:
- Pick your currency first. Upvotes: write a proposal reaction or a second-person scenario. Comments: write an open elicitation or a group callout.
- Escape the "What's" lane. If your draft starts with "What's your favorite", rebuild it as a scenario ("You can only keep one...") or a proposal ("How would you feel about...").
- Make answering effortless. Every winner in our top 100 can be answered from lived experience or pure imagination. If your question requires expertise, you have shrunk your audience.
- Spend characters on the setup. Aim for a complete premise, not a short one. The median winner runs 117.5 characters.
- Ride a moment when you can. 12 of the top 100 were news springboards. If everyone is experiencing the same event, a question about it inherits the relevance.
- Time it and push it early. We collected no timing data in this crawl, so we will not invent posting-hour claims. Check the subreddit's live activity pattern with our free best time to post tool, and understand how Reddit's algorithm ranks posts: early votes while the post is new count for far more than late ones. A question post that stalls at 1 upvote in its first hour usually dies there. That first-hour push is exactly what our buy Reddit upvotes service exists for: early, gradual momentum on a post that already deserves the visibility.
- Show up in your own thread. The elicitation formulas win on comments, and OP replies keep the thread climbing.
Before posting, also make sure your account clears the subreddit's bar. You can check any account's karma and age against a subreddit's posting requirements with our free subreddit stats checker.
What are the limits of this data?
We would rather flag these ourselves than have a commenter do it. First, Reddit's public listings only expose roughly the top 1,000 posts per listing, so this is a study of winners, not a random sample. It can tell you what winning posts look like, not the odds that any given formula wins, because the failures are invisible to us. Second, displayed scores are fuzzed by Reddit, so exact figures wobble. Third, the top 100 skews heavily toward 2019 to 2021, which means the opener and length comparisons partly reflect that era's habits, not just formula quality. And fourth, formula classification involves judgment calls at the edges; we used consistent rules, but another analyst might shuffle a few posts between buckets. The headline patterns, the upvote-versus-comment fork, the opener paradox, and the length gap, are large enough that reasonable reclassification does not erase them.
FAQ
What is the most upvoted AskReddit post of all time?
In our July 2026 crawl, the highest-scoring AskReddit post was "People who haven't pooped in 2019 yet, why are you still holding on to last years shit?" at 221,995 displayed upvotes. Reddit fuzzes public scores, so the exact number shifts slightly between visits, but it holds the top spot comfortably.
What AskReddit questions get the most comments?
Open elicitation questions, the "What's the best/worst/most X" pattern, earned the most comments in our top 100 with a median of 16,667, versus 4,447 for proposal-style questions. If comments are your goal, ask for contributions that cannot be expressed as a vote, then reply actively in your own thread.
Are longer AskReddit titles better?
Our data says winners run long: the median top-100 title is 117.5 characters versus 87 across all 995 posts we crawled. Length itself is not the cause. Winning titles are long because they pack a complete scenario, proposal, or punchline into the title, so write a full premise rather than padding.
How many upvotes does a top AskReddit question get?
Entry into the top 100 of our 995-post crawl required 92,092 displayed upvotes, and the median top-100 post sat at 104,102. Those are all-time-era numbers though. 87 of the top 100 date from 2019 to 2021, so realistic modern targets are far lower.
Is AskReddit good for karma farming?
Yes, it remains one of the fastest post-karma sources on Reddit: 58.7 million subscribers, thousands of daily posts, and no expertise required to participate. Use the formulas above, confirm your account meets requirements with a subreddit stats checker, and see our karma farming guide for the full workflow.