4 ms·

Ask HN: How to earn karma on HN?

6 points by xcoding 10y ago

xcoding 10y ago
Thank you.
venomsnake 10y ago
Submit famous person death article, SJW or anti think piece, apple articles or articles that claim the latest FOTM siver bullet is bullshit.
minimaxir 10y ago
Write good comments.
- grzm 10y ago
  See the guidelines for details, but in particular be civil and substantive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Tomte 10y ago
  Submissions get you an order of magnitude more karma than comments. It may be different for "famous" people like tptacek and Animats who are instantly recognized in any comment thread, so that lots of highly upvoted comments make up for the comment/submission discrepancy.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    Odds of getting a good submission upvoted are very, very low relative to the odds of having a good comment upvoted (will almost always be seen). From an EV perspective, it is better.
reitanqild 10y ago
All described in the guidelines. Post useful stuff, make useful comments.
kodfodrasz 10y ago
Just post The Right Opinion™ and Independent Thinkers™ from the Silicon Valley® California© will upvote you. Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes. It is also very important, to always post in a manner which cannot insult a demographic (eg. Independent Thinkers™), unless the insulted demographic does not represent the The Right Opinion™ (eg. realists, conservatives, anti-globalists, Drumpf voters, law abiding tax paying majorities, especially males can always be insulted).
- teslabox 10y ago
  > Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes. Is there a way to figure out a comment's ratio of upvotes to downvotes? Sometimes I see my comment's score oscillating...
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    No. This is, frankly, a really annoying aspect of many commenting systems. It's among the reasons I prefer range-based voting (say 1-5 scale) rather than up/down. On the back end it's possible to do some aggregate modeling that works out, for large numbers, somewhat equivalently, but this handles thin data poorly.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Worry about contributing positively to the site. Karma will take care of itself. And really, it's not worth much.
hon08 10y ago
Submit content suited to the site, as per Hacker News guidelines. Hopefully if you've been there a while you are aware of this, but here it is again just in case: Hacker News Guidelines. The first two paragraphs in the guidelines sum it all up:! On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Timing. I don't live in the US myself, and since roughly half of the site's users are in the US, the time of day makes a big difference in seeing your submission hitting the front page or floating to the bottom.
fuqted 10y ago
Judging from my upvotes the best way to go about it is to go to a popular comment in an over-crowded thread and leave your short, witty and unoffending thoughts. This method is probably the most time efficient. Spray and pray.

6 points by xcoding 10y ago

Thank you.

Submit famous person death article, SJW or anti think piece, apple articles or articles that claim the latest FOTM siver bullet is bullshit.

minimaxir 10y ago

Write good comments.

grzm 10y ago
See the guidelines for details, but in particular be civil and substantive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tomte 10y ago
Submissions get you an order of magnitude more karma than comments. It may be different for "famous" people like tptacek and Animats who are instantly recognized in any comment thread, so that lots of highly upvoted comments make up for the comment/submission discrepancy.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Odds of getting a good submission upvoted are very, very low relative to the odds of having a good comment upvoted (will almost always be seen). From an EV perspective, it is better.

reitanqild 10y ago

All described in the guidelines. Post useful stuff, make useful comments.

kodfodrasz 10y ago

Just post The Right Opinion™ and Independent Thinkers™ from the Silicon Valley® California© will upvote you. Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes. It is also very important, to always post in a manner which cannot insult a demographic (eg. Independent Thinkers™), unless the insulted demographic does not represent the The Right Opinion™ (eg. realists, conservatives, anti-globalists, Drumpf voters, law abiding tax paying majorities, especially males can always be insulted).

teslabox 10y ago
> Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes. Is there a way to figure out a comment's ratio of upvotes to downvotes? Sometimes I see my comment's score oscillating...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  No. This is, frankly, a really annoying aspect of many commenting systems. It's among the reasons I prefer range-based voting (say 1-5 scale) rather than up/down. On the back end it's possible to do some aggregate modeling that works out, for large numbers, somewhat equivalently, but this handles thin data poorly.

dredmorbius 10y ago

Worry about contributing positively to the site. Karma will take care of itself. And really, it's not worth much.

hon08 10y ago

Submit content suited to the site, as per Hacker News guidelines. Hopefully if you've been there a while you are aware of this, but here it is again just in case: Hacker News Guidelines. The first two paragraphs in the guidelines sum it all up:! On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Timing. I don't live in the US myself, and since roughly half of the site's users are in the US, the time of day makes a big difference in seeing your submission hitting the front page or floating to the bottom.

fuqted 10y ago

Judging from my upvotes the best way to go about it is to go to a popular comment in an over-crowded thread and leave your short, witty and unoffending thoughts. This method is probably the most time efficient. Spray and pray.