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How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma (2012)
- jgrahamc 11y agoSome headline numbers: I've been on Hacker News for well over 5 years (I joined on July 2, 2007) Ha! when I wrote that it was 5 years... now it's > 8 years. I think the same conclusion still applies: "So, to answer my original question about how I ended up with that much karma: slowly, consistently, over years by submitting things that people like."
- solaris999 11y agoNothing groundbreaking, but good analysis rarely is. I'd be interested to see the relationship between comment karma and age of post though - do earlier comments always get more attention?
- jacquesm 11y agoHN Karma functions much like the odometer on a car. Use the car more frequently and for longer distances and the odometer will advance more rapidly.
- joosters 11y agoSooooo tempted to downvote you just to try and prove you wrong :)
- DanBC 11y agoI suspect your single downvote would be have been countered by several people supplying corrective upvotes, so they could have ended up with more upvotes than they would have done without the initial downvote.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoUnless we all decide to take part in this prank :). Coordination isn't that hard, right? ;).
- jacquesm 11y agoDidn't you post a nice link about that recently?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI did. But isn't science about trying to prove yourself wrong? :).
- JupiterMoon 11y agoThat's called a voting ring and the mods with come down like a ton of soft fluffy teddy bears.
- KineticLensman 11y agoSomeone downstream said "A good trick is to post a solid counterpoint as a reply to the currently topmost comment: people are more likely to vote on comments near the top" So I'm looking for a counterpoint except that this is actually quite a good analogy (ignoring the quibble that a good driver can move to a new car with a fresh odometer but retain a good driving record. Or that there is no legal odometer equivalent to being downvoted) Edit: grammar
- ksherlock 11y agoCounterpoint: The Cuckoo's Calling, by Robert Galbraith, sold 500 copies. The Cuckoo's Calling, by JK Rowling, sold a 100,000+ copies.
- coderdude 11y agoA hundred people are looking at this like "ok." "How did I succeed? I just followed the rules." First hand, everyone sees that as bullshit. I like your contributions to this community. Don't be ashamed to say, "cuz I'm awesome like that."
- austenallred 11y agoHoly shit, 55,000 HN karma? And I thought I had a problem.
- jgrahamc 11y agoMe? A problem? It's tptacek you should be worried about... he's got 226,754 karma.
- austenallred 11y agoHe's in his own league
- baby 11y agoI'm really wondering how you can reach such a number... Thomas?
- patio11 11y agoI will take the liberty of answering for Thomas here. Most importantly, write a lot of comments, over years. Karma is primarily an odometer. I get 2X the karma per comment, but Thomas writes 4X the comments. Develop a beat on which you are known as a source of expert, reliable knowledge. There are other security people on HN, but Thomas is fairly reliably stapled to the top of any thread about security. That is not not justified. Write well. Have a voice. You can pick out most of Thomas' comments, and virtually all of his value-adding comments, immediately by his writing style. He's one of the five best writers on the site, without question. (Honest opinion rather than playing praise-my-friend-and-cofounder. It's not a close call.) You could ask him "Thomas, I am going to name one item in your kitchen. Write about it for two minutes. Ready? Parsnip, go." and it would be one of the ~10 best written comments on HN that day. There exists an observation I can make here about choosing which threads to participate in, which would have the effect of increasing one's karma but which is not necessarily something HN wants to encourage. I have 100% confidence that "Boosting my karma score" is not the reason why Thomas chooses threads to engage in, but be that as it may, I'll add it for completeness: the high-heat low-light threads about nerd politics result in getting lots of upvotes for fairly little effort, regardless of whether you conform with HN's community norms or whether you are the designated contrary voice. (Designated contrary voice is worth a lot of upvotes if you do it well.) Not related, but worth mentioning in case it isn't obvious: he really, really doesn't care about his karma score. Profoundly does not care. It happens to reward him for being "message board nerd" (his favored phrasing for this psychograph) but Thomas would play message board nerd for free and, indeed, at substantial cost.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoWhat strikes me is I hardly ever submit. I mostly comment (outside the tent pissing in). When I do submit I often get surprisingly nice amounts of karma. I just rarely discover something not already been submitted.
- steveklabnik 11y agoI distinctly remember saying "I'm not going to post any more when I hit 2000 karma." Then it was 3000. I even set noprocrast to something like 100 years, and quit cold turkey for a while... And then got pg to reset it for me.
- atrust 11y agowhat is your most upvoted comment?
- DanBC 11y ago830 points Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5450410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5450410 201 points comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309#up_4073928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309#up_4073928
- z3t4 11y ago> consistency over a long period That's the secret to all success!
- DiabloD3 11y agoAccording to the current leaderboard: 11. jgrahamc 55788 In comparison: 100. DiabloD3 18551 :<
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 11y agoYou're working too much at your job, and not procrastinating enough. Keep on pushing!
- forgotmypassw 11y agoThis could be simply answered with a single answer that applies to any community - just post whatever panders to the average community member if you care about irrelevant counter in your profile.
- arethuza 11y agoOne of the things I like about HN is that there really doesn't appear to be an "average community member" - a lot of opinionated knowledgeable people who have differing views. [It would be fun to try and come of a set of user stereotypes for HN - but there would be quite a few...]
- personjerry 11y agoOne could argue that "opinionated knowledgeable people" is already a pretty specific demographic
- ebbv 11y agoThat may be true but there are definitely common threads of things that always do well on HN (some of which I agree with so this is not necessarily a critique). Submission Topics: * Pro-privacy * Pro-big tech corporations (Apple, Google, even Microsoft) * Optimism about technology in general * Press releases about big funding rounds * Literally any blog post from Sam or pg. * Most blog posts from some other pillar of the tech world. Comments on Popular Submissions: * Agree with the original submission's premise and back it up with an anecdote or citations nobody will ever click on. * Ask a question that is really gentle and allows people to respond agreeing with the original article. * Defend against anyone who actually criticizes a submission that is doing well. If you've been here long enough you will be easily able to identify the patterns of things that will always do well, and the things that will always do poorly.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoSome other patterns I've identified: Submission Topics: * Any news related to Tesla, SpaceX and Elon Musk. * Space. * Rocket launch events with live streaming. * Anti-big tech corporations, in context of privacy. * Dietetics. Will always bring a lot of flamewar. * Show HNs. * Completely random Wikipedia article that describes something interesting. Comments on Popular Submissions: * One to five words of disagreement (usually flagkilled). * Comments debunking lies, mistakes and omissions in mainstream news coverage, often by someone directly or indirectly involved in the article's subject matter. * 'tokenadult posting a wall of text from whatever personal wiki he's maintaining, usually full of interesting facts and citations; almost always a top comment, deservingly so. And I must say, I love all of them. For those of us who hang out a lot here, HN is a community.
- gingerlime 11y agoThose blog posts about HN trends and stats remind me a bit of stuff about SEO. Lots of tricks and hacks, but essentially it boils down to relevant content. So yeah, you can probably gain a bit of an edge by posting at a certain time of day, or using specific keyword etc. but nothing beats an interesting post or a great comment.
- seivan 11y agoOutside of engineering responses I've noticed "progressive" (regressive left) comments never get down voted. Basically take anything Randy Marsh would say from latest season of South Park and you'll get up voted. No matter how ridiculous it sounds. Do the same with Cartman and something about minorities and you'll be (rightly so) down voted. There is no balance. I'm slightly facetious ;)
- JupiterMoon 11y agoI downvoted you. Because I often get downvoted for left leaning posts...
- seivan 11y agoThere is nothing pro working class about the shit portrayed in South Park.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoAnd now I upvoted this comment just because. I guess my point is that voting on HN seems largely random to me.
- ducuboy 11y agoMeans that the karma system is good. Anyone can point out what are the features that can be unlocked with more karma? I'd like to know what I'm missing.
- lifeformed 11y ago10k gets you $10k seed funding for your startup.
- austenallred 11y agoPlease tell me where to collect my check?
- newjersey 11y agoI believe that is Internet money, not real money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_on_Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_on_Strike
- ducuboy 11y agoYou could make good use of your karma by adding a Hacker News chapter to your User Acquisition book. I would pay some for that.
- ducuboy 11y agoThat's too much work for $10k.
- DanBC 11y agoYou need a small amount of karma to get the flag button. You need a bit more karma to be able to change the colour of the top bar. You need a bit more karma to get the downvote button. I'm not sure whether your average comment karma is used to place your comment on a page.
- jaynos 11y agoI worked really hard to get that downvote arrow, but then stopped caring much about karma and probably haven't actually downvoted anything (just like that the option is there). Now I'm off to change my banner color.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 11y agoI keep meaning to reverse-engineer my own submission stats to find out where this nearly 9k karma comes from. A good trick is to post a solid counterpoint as a reply to the currently topmost comment: people are more likely to vote on comments near the top.
- pinkunicorn 11y agoYou're going to end up with a few more with this post
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIt wasn't him that submitted it.
- EA 11y agoKarma should be worth more in the past since there were fewer voters and fewer submissions.
- sspiff 11y agoIf "Internet points" like karma motivates people, inflation like this is actually useful to keep people in the community active.
- EA 11y agoIt is also useful in searching for the most popular posts on HN. A post years ago on HN getting 150 to 200 points may have been the most popular (perhaps most significant) post for a while. We get posts like that daily now.
- kelvin0 11y ago>>" It's content that's king. That's good news for Hacker News because it indicates that what matters there is content and not game playing". << If that were the case I should have much more Karma. The fact is many times I posted a submission, only to see it slip off the headline in 0.2ms. Then a few days later, someone else (with more Karma) posts the same thing and it stays on for 2 days ... I'm not complaining, simply stating that it is not as cut and dry as the author mentions.
- doki_pen 11y agoIn theory, that shouldn't happen. HN should detect duplicates and just add an upvote to the existing submission when it is resubmitted.
- pjc50 11y agoIn practice, it happens quite a lot. The duplicate detector is easily fooled, and often the same underlying "story" is reported in a bunch of places. Getting traction on an HN submission is very random. Unless it's about discrimination in tech work, at which point it will be flagged off the front page almost immediately.
- adenadel 11y agoAlso, duplicates are only detected for (I think) 8 hours. After that you can resubmit.
- ganeumann 11y agoThe duplicate detector is a bit odd. Not sure what its rules are, but it doesn't always seem to work. One example (only noticed this because I wrote the linked blog post.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860103 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908463 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html?newpost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927285 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9129911 : http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html
- 11y ago
- edw519 11y agoA few observations from someone in the "Top 10" for 8 years now: - You're never as good as your upvotes. - You're never as bad as your downvotes. - Karma ebbs & flows with the audience, which changes dramatically. - I sense no correlation between karma & quality of real life. - I sense little correlation between karma & quality of contribution. - I sense heavy correlation between karma & volume of participation. - I sense very heavy inverse correlation between karma & real work completed. (Back to work)
- cryoshon 11y agoI sometimes wonder if there are people here (as on reddit) that try to game the system to get upvotes... seems ridiculous as there's no functional purpose of accumulating upvotes here. I assume that a lot of the top posters spend a large volume of time submitting and commentating on HN-- myself included.