3 ms·
Karma observations: if you reply in the early morning, before everyone gets up and reads HN, you'll get more karma than if you reply in the middle of the night
by PostOnce 16y ago
Karma observations: if you reply in the early morning, before everyone gets up and reads HN, you'll get more karma than if you reply in the middle of the night when no-one will see it. Same goes for replying to threads that don't have many comments yet. More comments = old news, less new viewers, less karma.
Also, the other day, I replied to someone, got downvoted to negative something, and then, as an experiment, I copied the comment, deleted it, and pasted it into a reply to the parent of the comment I originally replied to, and got upvoted +8.
It's science.
- jakevoytko 16y ago"Karma observations: if you reply in the early morning, before everyone gets up and reads HN, you'll get more karma than if you reply in the middle of the night when no-one will see it." This goes double for being an early riser on the East Coast! Until recently I commented early in the morning for a few months. I fared well - I usually got the top comment in the thread, unless a power user struck first. I don't think my comments were particularly insightful, but the timing worked - they would stay above the fold long enough to pick up an upvote. The "shape" of a comment also seems to affect the rating. A quick summary followed by several reasonable-sized paragraphs is a local maximum for gathering karma.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago"Why the downvotes", while usually legitimate, also guarantees a slew of upvotes.
- lsd5you 16y agoAlthough, presumably this effect will get arbitraged away as people become more aware of it. There will be a rush hour at the optimum time, negating its advantage somewhat.