How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma

http://blog.jgc.org/2012/12/how-i-ended-up-with-so-much-hacker-news.html

by jgrahamc • 14 years ago

117 90 14 years ago

blog.jgc.org

cyphersanctus• 14 years ago

Have you found a reason for the difference in the average karma that you calculated and the one on your actual profile?

jgrahamc3• 14 years ago

The HN code removes outliers.

  (def update-avg (user)
    (= (uvar user avg) (comment-score user))
    (save-prof user))

  ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
  ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.

  (def comment-score (user)
    (aif (check (nthcdr 5 (comments user 50)) [len> _ 10])
         (avg (cdr (sort > (map !score (rem !deleted it)))))
         nil))

gjm11• 14 years ago

More than that. [EDIT: When I wrote this, jgrahamc's comment said only "IIRC the HN algorithm removes outliers". Since then he's added much more. But I don't believe in deleting comments merely because edits to their parents have made them less valuable.] The "average" in the HN profile is something along the following lines: take the 6th to 25th most recent comments, throw away the one with most points, and take the average of the others. So it ignores old comments, it ignores very recent comments, and it ignores some kinds of outlier. Oh, and it's only actually recalculated every few days.

Personally I don't much like this: average karma is a fairly good proxy for what I want to be optimizing in my HN participation, but the way HN reports it more or less pessimizes it as a feedback tool for me. (I'm a fairly infrequent and "bursty" commenter; HN's reporting of average karma isn't up-to-date enough to tell me what HN thinks of what I've been doing recently, nor is it long-term enough to tell me what HN thinks of me overall.)

The right answer, of course, is not to care much about karma. This is made easier by the fact that the correlation between HN karma and my own judgement of comment quality is weak, and I'm arrogant enough to think the latter is more accurate.

rpm43214• 14 years ago

I've noticed that the average only updates sporadically - maybe every few days - not after every post. That obviously could have led to the numbers not adding up, in addition to the outliers being tossed, as mentioned by another commenter.

polyfractal3• 14 years ago

If you write quality comments, karma begets more karma because you'll sort higher on the page. For example, Patio11 usually writes helpful posts, and because of his obscene karma, he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.

But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore. At least, I've pretty much stopped looking at my karma score.

jgrahamc3• 14 years ago

I do not see any use of the user's karma in the sorting algorithm for comments in the published HN code.

rpm43214• 14 years ago

As I mentioned above: PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.

jrajav• 14 years ago

Are you certain that a user's karma factors into comment sorting? It's clear that more recent comments will be sorted to the top (temporarily), but I definitely haven't gotten the impression that existing karma scores affect anything. I don't know the factors of the real algorithm.

Edit: This could be related (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), comments are allowed some time at the top before they "mature."

  (let mature (table)
      (def delayed (i)
          (and (no (mature i!id))
              (acomment i)
              (or (< (item-age i) (min max-delay* (uvar i!by delay)))
                  (do (set (mature i!id))
                      nil)))))

rpm43214• 14 years ago

From what I've observed, the greatest factor in post ranking (besides upvotes on the post in question, obviously) is your karma average per post, not your total.

Also, PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.

mhurron• 14 years ago

> But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore.

Why did you care in the first place?

spindritf• 14 years ago

With very few points you don't have certain privileges on the site (downvoting, reporting) and you can get hellbanned for an unpopular comment.

Retric• 14 years ago

The ability to down vote and change the title bar are lined to karma.

polyfractal3• 14 years ago

Besides the tangible benefits others have mentioned, I think everyone falls prey to the desire to be "well liked". Karma means you wrote something other people liked or appreciated, so it is gratifying to watch your karma go up (because that means people like what you are saying).

Silly I know, but I also recognize that it is what made me try to write good comments when I first joined HN. Which is exactly what karma should do - make you try to be a better poster.

Timothee2• 14 years ago

As others have said, I don't believe your existing karma influences the weight of your new comments.

However, I would think that patio11's, edw519's and others' reputation attract karma more easily than the "regular" commenters. I mean that people are more easily convinced by whatever they say because they trust their reputation.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Whenever I see patio11 posting on any submission he is always the top rated comment, often when his comment (nice though it is) is fairly offtopic.

blacksmythe• 14 years ago

  >> he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.

Patio11 gets high karma for his comments because he consistently posts insightful comments and people (myself included) search out what he had to say: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11

polyfractal3• 14 years ago

Sure, I said as much in my post. He writes great comments which are very helpful. Which means they always get karma. But if there is a sorting of "high karma users" to the top...it simply accelerates how quickly he get's more karma.

Patio is one of my favorite posters, I'm not denigrating him at all. He certainly deserves all the karma he gets.

saraid216• 14 years ago

I look at my karma score mostly to notice that it changed, which moves me to look at my previous comments to see what got upvoted/downvoted and what got responded to. I kinda wish I had a feed or something for upvote/downvote/comment, but it hasn't been important enough for me to go looking for one.

digitalengineer2• 14 years ago

TL;DR content (of comments and most of all stories) is king.

sesqu• 14 years ago

It's actually the prince. The once and forever king is timing.

If you get pithy, insightful, argued, or just convenient comment in on a top story before it becomes a top story, you'll see an order of magnitude more points rolling your way than if you contribute research or elucidation in a day-old thread. A similar situation happens with submissions - you need reasonable content, but it can die with 1 point if the timing or title don't hit the sweet spot.

Content functions only as a high-pass filter.

digitalengineer2• 14 years ago

Good explanation! Timing -as always- is boss.

stephengillie2• 14 years ago

But it looks like I've got better at writing comments people vote up. Or perhaps the community has just grown and the number of upvotes has gone up for a well received comment.

Or people have noticed that you tend to write comments that are either well-designed, or that others widely agree with -- and because you've developed that brand, some people now upvote you because they recognize your name instead of anything to do with your posts.

Basically, people get used to seeing your name as one of the top comments, and upvote you more often, even if they believe your comment to be equal to others.

p4bl0• 14 years ago

I've been here for a little while now and there are many usernames that I know, but that never influence my upvotes, it might influence how much trust I put into what is said, but not my upvotes.

polshaw• 14 years ago

I agree, i would be very interested to see the effect of hiding usernames (an ID that lasted only for the thread), I bet it would distribute points significantly differently.

There is also the timing aspect however; habitual commenter are more likely to be in early to a thread.

stephengillie2• 14 years ago

And it's much easier to get upvotes when you're one of the first posters in a comments thread -- others are more likely to upvote you instead of writing their own comment.

If you see upvotes (U) as a product of the number of people viewing HN at a specific point in time (V) and the percentage of people who will upvote the post (Q) multiplied by the number of points in time (T) during which the post is viewable, we find U=VQT.

We can increase U by posting when V is highest, by posting comments when the most people are visiting HN. We can increase U by increasing the % of people who like the post, which usually means writing a high-quality comment. We can increase U by increasing T, the amount of time the post is available, simply by posting it earlier.

brudgers6• 14 years ago

For me personally, there's nobody I automatically upvote. There are a few people who get the benefit of the "PG effect" in that I automatically associate their name with specific domain expertise and give them the benefit of the doubt within that domain.

What I have found is that writing comments that get upvotes provides valuable feedback about the mechanics of writing comments that get upvotes - just as writing downvoted comments provides feedback (more quickly). Writing one good comment increases the likelihood of writing another one - writing bad comments, also increases the likelihood of good comments via downvotes.

HN provides editorial feedback in a form other than LOL's - comments and votes. Editorial feedback is a proven way to improve writing, and improving writing is the surefire way to get higher comment scores.

mnicole• 14 years ago

This is why I stopped reading MetaFilter comments; it was the same people getting upvoted simply because they had been upvoted before with little to do with the quality or even correctness of their comment. If they came into a post with an opposing view than the previous posters, it all of a sudden became an apology fest and comments began skewing to that user's perspective. When I saw the effect it was having on propagating misinformation and misconceptions, I had to put the keyboard down and walk away.

lmm• 14 years ago

It's why 4chan, for all its ills, is still one of the best places to find really creative insight.

gknoy3• 14 years ago

That's an interesting idea, but I don't think that's always the case. Sure, I recognize names like tptacek on occasion, but I frequently read (and upvote) a good comment, and only later realize who wrote it. I've even up-voted several interesting things in the same thread because they present information well, with connections or information that I might not have drawn, and then realized they were all by the same person.

I suspect the styling on the site, which presents non-comment bits in a lighter grey color, helps to de-emphasize the authors' identities in favor of the comments themselves.

wonjun3• 14 years ago

Great post, I need to increase my current karma, 68, avg 1.6

rpm43214• 14 years ago

Well, this post won't help ;)

In all seriousness, I really wouldn't worry about it at all.

If you're not just being yourself, asking questions with candor when they come up, and chipping in with answers when you can, you're going to miss the point of HN.

techdmn• 14 years ago

I agree, but I also think it's a tricky subject. Doing things for the sole purpose of increasing your karma would probably be considered a negative behavior. On the other hand the community gives karma to reward behavior it approves of (and vice versa), so it isn't right to completely ignore it either.

wonjun3• 14 years ago

Yeah, true, okay, I will just be myself but start becoming more active.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

The thing I like most about (commenting on) HN is that it's incredibly easy to predict if a comment will get karma or not. HN is slow enough and the comment listing algorithm works in such a way that if you post during the first half of a submissions life your comment is guaranteed exposure and if the comment has value it'll float to the top.

I don't think I've ever posted a comment and felt that the score (or attention) didn't fairly reflect the value of the comment[1]. Something about the uniformity is very reassuring, unlike reddit where you need to either be in the first 5% of comments or provide something seriously exceptional that appeals to every reader to even have a chance of being listed near the top of a submission.

From my experience the "best" scoring comments are easy to pinpoint why they've scored well and if someone was so inclined they could very easily spend their day "farming" karma here, but if someone were to do so they'd be benefiting the site because the only real way to obtain karma here is to provide value. Even if that value is trivial (like mentioning a relevant article, or giving a brief anecdote that validates a point) it's still value.

[1] Sometimes controversial topics result in "unfair" scores, but they're also very easy to expect before hand and generally if you post something controversial you'll get good enough discussion from other users that it's never a question of "I wish I knew why people gave me that score!" which is the most frustrating thing.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

Most of the time this is true, but I've certainly had comments like this one[1] where I thought maybe deserved some upvotes, but an order of magnitude more than what I would consider other good comments. And sometimes I post what I think is a wonderfully insightful post about how simplified memory access methods are the most important part of RISC nowadays and nobody upvotes it.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4789008

diminish• 14 years ago

It is not only the algorithm which works so. Our brains also in a similar fashion; we first try to find out whether someone else's comment resonates with our impressions or fragments of what remains in our minds after reading the story.

So I upvoted you because you wrote first. You have to first mover's advantage. And I believe it is fair.

brudgers6• 14 years ago

The first mover advantage goes beyond increased exposure. It means that one has maximumized their ability to shape the direction of the conversation in alignment with their thoughts. Because early comments are more likely to draw responses, the top poster in a thread has the most opportunity to clarify and extend their thoughts in follow-up responses.

Follow-up responses will tend to be received in the same vein as the initial post, and if the initial post gained traction the one's follow-up is likely to garner upvotes as well.

gknoy3• 14 years ago

I tend to up-vote a good deal of comments, but -- like you -- I do it more the first time I read a post's comments. So, any comments written before I read it are more likely to get upvotes than any that are written later and which I see on later visits. (This is compounded by the fact that I'm trying to cut down my lurking on HN, since it's so easy to keep reading all the good stuff that other people write.)

btilly• 14 years ago

For my comment history, I emphatically disagree.

For example I do not think that http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4843141 is anywhere close to being the best comment that I've made in the last month, but I have to go back to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684916 to find one that is higher rated.

mkr-hn• 14 years ago

It's easy to mistakenly believe HN is meritocratic if you have enough HN celebrity for people to seek your comments out. My comments with the least thought behind them get the most upvotes. Those with the most thought pass by unseen.

It's a powerful disincentive for putting much thought into comments.

psycho2• 14 years ago

Getting karma by post describing how you got karma? Nice move... (guess, I won't get much karma for this comment)

And in fact as I can see there's no much use in HN karma - smart comments are more useful. At least, they can do you good when you apply to YC (that's what PG says at least :)).

gknoy3• 14 years ago

I voted the article up not because of its subject matter, but rather for the thorough way in which he analyzed and presented it. It was a notable amount of effort to collect the data, and it takes some skill to put it together in a way which one can derive meaning from.

He then proceeds to do exactly that, and give us all a good tactic for increasing our karma: Post Consistently Interesting Stuff over a Long Time. Sure, we all read that and think, "_duh_, of course that's how to get it", but it's nice to see that there's data backing it.

psycho2• 14 years ago

Well, I understand that hackers are a bit like scientists - they like to have proved data (by the way, I'm more like a humanitarian who believes his feelings and intuition).

And I understand your reasons and they're quite good. I don't think that it's a bad article to vote up - moreover I like the article too. There's some "pure math" magic in it that I also like (although I'm a humanitarian as I've mentioned before).

jccc4• 14 years ago

These comments of mine were valued by HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4631280

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431975

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4754809

These comments were punished by HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4789162

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515735

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515784

I would like to find an online community that welcomes and values the latter kind of participation.

mseebach4• 14 years ago

For the downvoted (not "punished") comments:

1 (FizzBuzz): You're responding to a strawman ("unrealistic audition programming for a live audience") and dismissing, rather than responding to the very point the article makes at great length ("Perhaps the hiring pool really is that bad"). I wouldn't have voted it down, but it's honestly not much of a value-add.

2 (Craigslist middleman): Again, I wouldn't have downvoted, but you're being assertive for one side in the debate without backing your assertion by reasoning or arguments. Also, it might just be me, but I catch a whiff of aggression in your comment.

3 (same thread): You're aggressive and you're asserting that some nefarious secrecy is going on, when no-one else has claimed that.

Granted, in both of 2 and 3, there's a likelihood of you being voted down because it's a story about an entrepreneurial guy doing well, and you disagreeing with the legitimacy of what he's doing. This is a very entrepreneurial forum, so there's a bias against that.

brudgers6• 14 years ago

"downvoted (not "punished")"

Downvotes which one feels are unwarranted are best considered editorial feedback. Take them as evidence that your writing did not match the expectations of the audience which received it. This may be due to misassumptions about the nature of the audience, or due to a miscommunication of the point one is trying to make. The solution to downvotes one feels are unwarranted is improving one's writing.

jccc4• 14 years ago

From my FizzBuzz comment: "I do not object to the broad points being made here." I am not dismissing anything, I am agreeing. I am then trying to add what I believe is a very important problem being missed -- that there are many valuable developers whose personalities mean they will do very badly on a timed paper-programming test in the midst of an interview. Testing of this kind is deeply unfair to them, and deceives the tester. I'm sorry if you feel that's not much of a value-add. I disagree.

It's difficult for me to imagine anyone reading those threads and missing that conclusion. It seems to me that it is the primary driver.

erichocean• 14 years ago

I started monitoring recent posts (including this one) for downvotes awhile ago.

Whenever I get one, regardless of how many upvotes I've gotten, I delete the post immediately.

Sometimes, I'll also delete any other recent posts done in the same reading session, if they're of a similar quality.

This had the effect, over time, of increasing my karma. It also caused me to write things that are generally uncontroversial and, well, bland.

mseebach4• 14 years ago

Don't do that. First, I've done many comments that get a single downvote to 0. Typically, it's a little controversial/against the grain, and it gets the "disagree" downvote. Those are typically voted back up to 1 pretty quickly (I also make a point of upvoting posts that have clearly been disagree-downvoted, even if I wouldn't otherwise have upvoted it).

Second, there's the point of HN karma, especially of the magnitude that can never reach the leaderboard, is completely worthless. I'm sure being on the leaderboard (ie. minor HN royalty) can open some doors, if you want it to, but yours and mine never will.

petercooper• 14 years ago

I'm behind jgrahamc at #29 but my results would be similar. One extra driver, though, was getting on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders was a goal a few years ago. I specifically spent more time on the site and began to submit stuff. Nothing low quality or spammy but just 'putting the time in.'

Now /leaders isn't highlighted anymore, I spend less time contributing and more time lurking. This is neither good nor bad as I am statistically insignificant in the great tide of stuff on here. But we're all motivated in different ways in different contexts and I've learned over the years a main motivator for me is credit/recognition/"glory" (and not the points per se). Now I know that's a 'quirk' of mine, I take advantage of it as a way of getting my work done and stopping procrastination, rather than trying to do well on HN or wherever ;-) Except for this comment, surely..

jcfrei• 14 years ago

maybe another factor to consider (and don't take this as a critique) might be your user name. I doubt few people actually confuse you with pg. nonetheless I believe it's a name that sticks out given the prominence of the name graham on this board - and as a result your user name might be easier to remember.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

I've been curious (I don't advocate trying this) as to how possible it would be to create an account for the explicit purpose of farming karma (for the minimum amount of effort) and what strategy would be best to achieve this.

nsns• 14 years ago

Submitting random articles from favorite sites (TechCrunch, Ars Technica, TorrentFreak, etc.) as soon as they're published (i.e. before anyone else), would probably get you a few thousand Karma points in a month or two.

From my point of view however, getting good points on a comment is a lot more satisfying and worthwhile than your general Karma count (once you're over the various thresholds).

philhippus• 14 years ago

I drifted over to HN from reddit (and pre-meltdown digg before that). While I had previously considered reddit comments to be 'higher brow' than those at digg, I have found the gap to HN to be substantially wider. Not so much in terms of grammar nazism and semantic pedantry, but more so tone, content and comment structure.

Glib and offhand attempts at humour are not much appreciated here, even though they might contain some wit, which reddit would gobble up.

The HN audience seems to upvote comments that are analytical, insightful and informative. This takes some adjustment for reddit heroes who can reap great karma with a well-placed meme.

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

It's all about getting rid of the noise.

Because there's nothing worse than seeing 7,000 comments on a Reddit article and 99.7% of them being complete garbage. That's discouraging to a community. Why even bother posting when someone's lame joke is 347 votes ahead of yours. So I'm a complete asshole on HN. When I see jokes or one liners I downvote away. I feel guilty and sympathize for the poster but... I like the noise free environment too much. So I wipe away the tears and downvote away.

goostavos• 14 years ago

I followed your same path too. Each time I 'migrated' it was due to an extremely fascinating article and great discussion. When I went from Digg to Reddit, the article that got me was this very in-depth analysis of what the future of space 'warships' would be like. It was great fun; the author put a lot of thought into the subject, and the comments were equally insightful as to what the mechanics of turning a massive ship in space would be.

An equally good article/discussion is what led me here. Of the aggregation sites I know of on the web, this place is currently the only one that retains (for the most part) it's signal to noise ratio in the comments.

Reddit anymore, even though being subscribed to very specific subeddits, is just frustrating to use. It seems to me that the average age of the user has shifted downward as the site has grown. Couple that with a lack of moderation, and comments are all now one line, or a 'funny gif' response, which, by the way, are strictly outside of reddiquette...

eshvk• 14 years ago

> Glib and offhand attempts at humour are not much appreciated here, even though they might contain some wit, which reddit would gobble up.

Slick attempts at humor don't certainly get downvoted, they may not be the top comment. I still think that the reddit model when brought down to Subreddits still works. I am part of some very tiny subreddits and there is still a free flow of high quality information.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

One other issue that I've noticed after looking at the leader board

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

here on Hacker News from time to time is that pg's last major change in the site code (to make comment karma scores invisible to persons other than the person posting the comment) really seems to have made a positive difference in the site. That change was quite controversial when it was made.

Site founder pg began the experiment by opening a thread, "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

After looking at the discussion there, he announced an experiment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

601 days ago of not publicly showing comment karma scores, but rather just letting each user see her or his own comment karma scores when logged in. That change was protested in several LONG threads in the first few months after the change, but what I noticed is that I started seeing the comments of the users from whom I learned the most, the most often, more consistently sorting to the top of threads, and on the leader board I noticed that the AVERAGE comment scores (still disclosed there) of the 100 highest-karma users began better matching who was making substantive, helpful comments as contrasted with who was making comments that were, in pg's words, "a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

A reality check on what kind of comments get upvoted is to look from time to time at the bestcomments list,

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

which is still not exactly really a "best of" list of HN comments, but which has converged to better quality since that software change. The user jgrahamc appears to have seen his average comment karma score rise under the new software settings, deservedly so. Other users whose comments are especially thoughtful, whose user profile pages I visit to look up their most recent comments, also appear to have gained in average karma over the last year and a half that that software change has been in effect.

robbiea• 14 years ago

good point. Now that you mention it, I actually forgot that there used to be "points". I was adamantly against it before, but now I'm used to it. I kind of enjoy it.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

To be a contrarian I'll say that jgc's blog is representative of the "new journalism" that puts pageviews uber alles. In particular, I think jgc is more interested in exploting the hacker news community for traffic than in good writing.

It's true that jgc writes a lot, but I'd say his average article is pretty average. His best articles are great, but it seems somehow he manages to score a run for a blog post that's really worth a ball or a single. It's hard not to believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.

jgrahamc3• 14 years ago

> It's hard not to believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.

Take that back. It's not true: I have no voting ring for my posts.

And here's some data to back that up. According to the HN Search API I have submitted 373 items that are posts on jgc.org (out of a total of 670). Of those the following karma has been gained:

  Points Number of posts

  1	 81
  <5	 102
  <10	 32
  <50	 74
  <100	 47
  <200	 6
  <500	 31

So, 215 posts out of 373 had less than 10 karma. Only 37 posts out of 373 had > 100. So, as you say, some of my posts (about 10%) are greatly appreciated here, but most are not. No voting ring needed.

All those posts account for 12,624 points of karma (from my total of 18,119 points obtained from submissions, not comments). So 56% of my submissions were for my blog and resulted in 70% of my submission karma.

brudgers6• 14 years ago

Articles don't just gain points by direct upvotes. They also gain a point when someone else submits it.

I suspect that there is significant overlap between his regular readers and HN participants. People read his blog and submit it.

Furthermore, articles about writing and karma acquisition are often topics of interest to HN's readership, as are articles about HN.

There's no conspiracy needed to explain it. Not to mention that his karma score from comments alone would put the author on the leader board.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

One mans voting ring is another man's circle of friends.

DanBC• 14 years ago

I disagree with the voting ring comment. That's pretty harsh.

Just for fun, here are the posts jgc makes by domain:

http://imgur.com/BKCaW

And here are the posts of the blog.jgc.org domain by poster:

http://imgur.com/xqpEF

mturmon• 14 years ago

I think you just said his average article is average, and his best articles are great.

If I had any articles that are great, I'd be very happy indeed. I might even submit everything I wrote, just to let the community decide which are great.

James_Henry2• 14 years ago

Woah - I didn't even know a leaderboard existed!

omnisci2• 14 years ago

So do you get an award for having high Karma?

I think people put too much weight on things like this. I've been on message boards for over 12 years. People know me because of my name and what I contribute, my karma (which we don't have) or likes or friends don't matter.

dsr_• 14 years ago

There are a couple of awards. One is the ability to downvote as well as upvote. That comes pretty early. The second is the ability to change the color of the stripe at the top of the page (for your own, logged-in views).

omnisci2• 14 years ago

Well, now that you put it like that, I'm going to collect karma (actually the downvote thing is helpful) like a mofo! :)

taylorbuley• 14 years ago

Regarding average karma per post, I happily tote a ~2.5 while still hitting a spot the leaderboard. I could drive up my average number by picking stuff I could be certain the community wanted to see, but I purposefully submit things that I think are contrarian or otherwise overlooked. I think pushing our collective comfort zone is worth it.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

If you want to see how much is linked to content quality and how much comes from having a well-known account, perhaps it is time to open another. Posting high-quality stuff from another account should yield the same results if that is the only signal used when people up vote things.

benologist• 14 years ago

I think this shows a real problem with karma - submissions are worth shitloads more than comments. There are already multiple people on the leaders list for nothing more than spewing out generic tech sites.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to create a separate account just to see how high I could get my "avg" metric. I think I have a general idea of what causes posts to get upvoted. But that's not my goal when I write comments.

My best posts (on QM or molecular dynamics or color theory) don't get that many points but I still write them because I feel like they are informative and somebody could get a lot of use out of them. I occasionally also write semi-controversial posts that I know won't get many upvotes, but I still feel the arguments I make can be useful to others or hopefully at least spur thought.

On the other hand, submissions remain a mystery to me. My highest voted submission (466 points on old Russian photographs) nearly slid off the new page before being caught right at the end with a surge of upvotes. However, my submission on Titan (now the world's fastest supercomputer) got no interest whatsoever, which really surprised me given the demographics of this place.

guelo• 14 years ago

A better HN submission would have been a JavaScript site that generates all those graphs for other HN users.

hdivider• 14 years ago

I'm willing to bet that short attention spans play a significant role in making karma less meaningful - in the sense that it can penalise more extensive and thorough comments in favour of short, snappy one- or two-liners.

Take the following scenario: you've got some interesting topic that most HN users will click on, and the #1 comment is like this:

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If you're in that jittery state of mind when you just want some infotainment without reading dozens of lines of dense and subtle text, isn't it more likely that you'll just read the reply to that top comment first, since it's short and snappy? It may even make you feel that you've made progress towards understanding what the parent comment was about, without actually spending the required amount of time on it. Topics on HN obviously have a strong bias towards solid intellectual content (and I don't necessarily mean academic topics), so it's probably unlikely that much insight can be gained from very short comments - unless the poster is particularly observant and skilled in condensing information, of course.

That's just one of the reasons why I'm sceptical about karma. I think it does serve a purpose, but if the majority of users go into a topic with no real intention to read or comprehend anything thoroughly, karma becomes a less meaningful measure of contribution.

Sodaware• 14 years ago

Reddit suffers heavily from short attention spans, mostly in the popular subreddits (/r/pics, /r/funny etc). There are still some long comments that rise to the top, but most of the time it's a joke or reference. Much like the content.

intelliot• 14 years ago

I like the Hacker News karma system. Is there anything else like it?

nu2ycombinator• 14 years ago

What is avg? And howz it calculated?

DannyBee• 14 years ago

I hope the karma->US dollars conversion rates stay high so that someday I can use my karma to put a down payment on a house.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

Posting a popular article link can earn hundreds of karma points without much effort, whereas you would have to spend a lot of time writing many insightful comments to get the same karma. Comments also carry the risk of downvotes.

How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma

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