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Do you treat HN as a game?
I just found it would be interesting whether you would associate hacknews as a game.
There's definitely a lot of community interactions and insightful knowledge flowing around HN, but at the same time, with the concept of karma points, do you treat the whole thing as a game?
do try to earn as many karma points as you possibly can?
are you consistently trying to improve your karma avg ratio?
do you strategically think before you post, and make sure your comments yield the most points?
or are there other ways you perceive HN?
I just find it fascinating because the simple concept of karma points, which is not really a virtual currency, all it is it's just a number, but somehow psychologically I feel like this number is important.
What do you guys think?
- rflrob 16y agoI think exposing average karma as a metric reflects the values of the community: better to have insightful comments that lots of people find helpful than to spam the boards with as many posts as you can to see what sticks.
- wladimir 16y agoSomething like the median would be even better; the average is too sensitive to outliers, if you have one post that is either karma'd into heaven or completely trashed, it should not reflect that much in your score. After all, it's better if someone consistently posts insightful comments.
- imkevingao 16y agobut doesn't some spam post get more credit than intellectual discussions? Because lately I realized that something Sean Parker said about the Social Network movie got way more credit than it deserved as opposed to some interesting innovative hacking news some newcomer provides
- brudgers 16y agoThe karma points a post earns only correlate with merit relative to the popularity of the discussion. A middling comment on a front page story might earn a dozen or more points, while a brilliant essay on in a four comment three point discussion may not even garner a single upvote. But that doesn't make karma meaningless, it's still a great feedback tool for improving one's writing.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoOff-topic: it's good form to put "Ask HN:" in the title of an item like this. I see you've done so in the past - any reason why you stopped? On-topic: An interesting question, and I'm sure some people do, but I don't. I want a technical forum that exposes me to new ideas and different points of view. I only pay attention to karma to try to gauge the nature of the community. If you check out my submissions you can see that my interests don't align especially well, but there is some overlap.
- imkevingao 16y agoyea sorry about that, it was late night on the East Coast when I posted, so I guess I wasn't really thinking well, but I'll look out in the future.
- j_baker 16y agoI have a theory that part of the reason why HN tends to distract people from work is that it's a substitute for hearing "Good job! Keep up the good work!" Work life can be so unrewarding at times, so it's easy to use your HN karma score as a surrogate.