Reddit Comment Burial Calculator

How Reddit's comment collapse system works

Reddit automatically hides comments that pick up enough downvotes. The exact threshold varies slightly — most subreddits collapse a comment at −4 or −5, and individual users can nudge it in their settings — but −5 is the universal safe target: at −5 a comment is collapsed for virtually everyone, tucked behind a grey "comment score below threshold" line that takes a click to expand. Most people never click. For a brand defending a launch or an AMA, pushing a spam comment below that line is often the difference between a clean thread and a conversion problem.

Why comments get upvoted before they get buried

A bad-faith comment rarely starts at −5. Trolls and bad actors often upvote their own comment from a couple of accounts to push it up the thread where it's visible. It might sit at +12 for an hour before enough organic downvotes arrive to counter it — and in that hour it's the first thing every visitor reads. The calculator above tells you how many downvotes you need to collapse it now, not after the damage is done.

Doing it without getting detected

The mistake that gets people caught is velocity. A comment dropping from +12 to −20 in two minutes is obviously manipulated, and Reddit may freeze the comment's score or trigger a backlash where real users upvote it out of spite. A safe burial uses aged accounts on unique residential IPs, voting at a pace that matches the thread's natural activity — the comment drifts down over an hour or two and collapses quietly. That's exactly what our delivery engine is built to do: buy Reddit downvotes that bury spam without leaving a footprint.

Running an upvote campaign as well? Keep the ratio natural with the Reddit vote ratio calculator, or read how to hide negative Reddit comments.