Buying aged Reddit accounts — does karma matter or is it all post history?

Looking at a batch of 2015-2017 accounts. Seller is quoting by karma: 10k karma accounts at 4x the price of 1k karma accounts, same age.

My instinct is that karma is a vanity metric and what matters is whether the account has history in subs adjacent to my niche. But I have not bought any yet and I would rather learn from someone else's $400.

Anyone compared the two directly?

Your instinct is right. I have a 900-karma 2016 account that posts freely in a sub where a 40k-karma account of mine gets auto-removed, because one has three years of comments there and the other does not.

Karma pricing exists because buyers ask for karma. I price on age plus sub history now and it is a harder sell, because the thing that matters is harder to put in a listing.

That is a useful admission from a seller. So the premium I would pay for 10k karma is mostly buying someone else's marketing.

Partly. High karma does help with sub minimum thresholds, which some big subs set at 1k-5k. Past that it is decoration.

Also check whether the karma is comment or post karma. Ten thousand post karma from one viral meme tells you nothing about whether the account can comment without being flagged.

Tried something close to this last year and it fell apart at scale. Curious whether yours holds.