What is CQS? Contributor Quality Score Made Simple (Reddit)

Reddit is visited more than two billion times every single month, and that’s a challenge for a platform so reliant on content moderation. To help the hard work of Reddit moderators, a new automation resource was created: the Reddit Contributor Quality Score, or CQS.

In this guide to Reddit’s CQS, you’ll learn what CQS is, what it can be used for, and how it changed the platform. Later on, I will let you know about some of the things you can do (and avoid doing) to raise your Contributor Quality Score and use Reddit properly once more.

But first, here’s how using KeyMentions can easily help you avoid all of these issues (and no, you don’t even need to learn what CQS is)!

How to Avoid Reddit’s CQS With KeyMentions

A low Reddit CQS can render your Reddit account useless and hurt your marketing strategy. But to go from a low CQS to a high CQS is highly time-consuming and frustrating. So, why not avoid all of this CQS business from the get-go by using KeyMentions?

KeyMentions is a brand monitoring software for Reddit, and it works like this:

1. You create a project for your brand with a description of its main features;
2. KeyMentions generates a list of keywords based on the project description (you can also set your own without any limitation);
3. KeyMentions identifies Reddit active threads where your selected keywords are currently being discussed;
4. You have the opportunity to automatically generate comments for each thread and effectively post on Reddit without having an account.

With KeyMentions, you don’t need to have a Reddit account to perform some stellar Reddit marketing. This means that you don’t need to care about Reddit’s new (and slightly confusing) Contributor Quality Score to build your brand’s reputation on the platform.

But even though KeyMentions makes it unpainfully easy to bypass Reddit’s CQS, keeping informed is always a good idea. So, let’s take a close look at everything marketers should know about the new Reddit Contributor Quality Score.

Key Reddit Terms:

• Posts: Used for starting new discussions in Subreddits;
• Comments: Used to reply to posts;
• Upvotes: Used to classify posts and comments as positive;
• Downvotes: Used to classify posts and comments as negative;
• Moderators/Mods: The people who moderate content on Reddit.

What is Reddit’s Contributor Quality Score?

The Reddit Contributor Quality Score, or CQS, is a user-rating system designed to help moderators automatize their operations. Each Redditor is assigned a tier level, visible under its name as shown in red in the image above.

This user rating can then be used by busy Reddit moderators to perform automatized operations. For example: A Subreddit moderator can opt to automatically exclude comments and posts made by users at one of the lowest tier levels. This is the main benefit of CQS.

According to the world’s least helpful Help page, Reddit’s Contributor Quality Score is divided into five tiers:

1. Highest
2. High
3. Moderate
4. Low
5. Lowest

And that’s as far as Reddit goes when it comes to explaining CQS rankings… We know, of course, that Highest is the best and Lowest is the worst, but Reddit doesn’t give us a clue about what makes a Reddit account’s CQS move up or down.

To solve the mystery of the Reddit Contributor Quality Score, I had to dig deep, starting with a short analysis of what changed in the platform ever since CQS came into the picture…

How Did CQS Changed Reddit?

“Once upon a time,” Reddit users were ranked based on two main factors:

1. Reddit Karma: A score that reflects a user’s participation on Reddit, defined mainly by the attribution of upvotes and downvotes to comments;
2. Account age: Refers not to the age of the Reddit user, but to how long an account has been created (with older meaning better).

In the good old days, Reddit marketers just needed to follow a simple formula to manage high-ranking accounts: posting and commenting regularly while waiting for the account to get older. But now, with the introduction of CQS, things have changed…

In addition to Reddit Karma, Reddit’s automation tool (known as Spam Filter) has now a second user-ranking device that mods can use to exclude users, comments, and posts from their Subreddits: the Contributor Quality Score.

The result? Reddit comments disappearing for new, mysterious reasons, Redditors getting banned from threads where they used to farm Karma, and experienced platform users suddenly getting a [Low] tag under their name!

While things may seem desperate now, there is some evidence of how Reddit marketers can effectively raise their CQS. But first, let’s learn how you can check your Reddit account’s Contributor Quality Score.

How to Check Your Reddit CQS

Reddit’s CQS gets so confusing sometimes that some people don’t even know how to check their own score! Luckily, it’s pretty simple; you just need to:

1. Visit the Subreddit r/WhatIsMyCQS;
2. Create a new post with the word ‘test;’
3. Wait for Reddit to respond with your current CQS.

To look for changes in your Reddit Contributor Quality Score, it’s advisable to wait for roughly a day before creating a new post.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for:

How to Have the Highest Reddit Contributor Quality Score

Reddit’s CQS is both new and mysterious. That makes it harder for many experienced Redditors to understand how to climb the ladder of success, going from a disappointing [Lowest] to a desirable [Highest]. But there’s hope on the horizon.

Thanks to some hard digging and the vital support of a series of practical tests developed by YouTuber Bjorn Olsen, KeyMentions was able to identify a tried-and-tested method for growing your CQS; and it’s very different from how Reddit Karma works!

Olsen experimented with different possibilities for how CQS works and determined that, unlike Reddit Karma, it is not influenced by user connectivity. This means that adding a Google account to your Reddit profile is useless.

In another experiment, he determined that posting and upvoting on Subreddits was harmful to one’s Contributor Quality Score. Why this is, nobody seems to be really sure, but it’s the kind of practical tip all Reddit marketers should keep in their notebooks.

So, how can I grow my Reddit Contributor Quality Score? By commenting and responding to comments regularly. 

This seems to show that Reddit’s new ranking system is designed to inspire discussion, as they want their existing posts to be richer and more interactive. They’re looking to incentivize the back-and-forth between users while deflating the value of post creation.

This makes sense if you consider that many Reddit posts feel utterly irrelevant and have no intrinsic value. If the user rank of Redditors is hurt anytime they create a new post, then they will try to make every post meaningful. 

Hopefully, all of this will ultimately contribute to the enrichment of Reddit by increasing the average quality of its posts.

Summary

Today, we have learned that the Reddit Contributor Quality Score is a new Reddit Spam Filter tool that allows mods to set up automation tasks based on user ranking. CQS is composed of five quality tiers, adding up to the two ranking systems Reddit already had: Reddit Karma and account age.

To check your current CQS, you just need to visit r/WhatIsMyCQS. If your CQS is too low and you want to grow it, this is the best formula we have available:

• Avoid posting and upvoting;
• Comment and respond to comments regularly.

If you’re trying to learn more about CQS not because you use Reddit personally, but professionally, there’s an easy way out of this mess: KeyMentions, the social listening tool that lets you monitor and comment on Reddit without having a Reddit account!

What is CQS? (FAQ)