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I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all

by mzl 16y ago

I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention, even though I'm not such a high-ranking commenter.

jasonkester 16y ago
First, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost. Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :) Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.
- mzl 16y ago
  Thanks. That comment was my biggest hitting one ever, so my average will probably jump quite a bit. Funny that it should be in a meta-karma thread. I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing. Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :) * Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.
  - khafra 16y ago
    You started me thinking about ways to normalize average karma, but I haven't come up with one that makes me happy yet: - adjusting to other comments on the same post doesn't account for timing - adjusting for time after the post is gameable by necromancers - adjusting by the total karma of the post commented on is incomplete; it also needs some relation to the time lapse from posting to comment - penalizing short comments might help discourage snarky one-liners Are there browser plugins to give an adjusted average karma score this way, yet?
- dtby 16y ago
  Why, then, even bother checking their HN karma score, GitHub commits, WoW gear score or Stack Overflow reputation points? Either their comment is useful to you where you live today or its not. You don't have to justify your judgement by yet another subjective. (By a... checking... 3.4 karma/comment user who was sub-1.0/comment last week; not having changed his opinions or commenting style.)
dhimes 16y ago
Agreed. I find karma average of little interest. Unfortunately it does encourage a certain type of bad behavior in those who do. I can appreciate what pg is trying to achieve with it, but I don't think it's helped the site, and in fact has perhaps detracted from some conversations that "could have happened" except the people came late to the thread. I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there. The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.
bm98 16y ago
OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions? [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871
- mzl 16y ago
  I don't have any submission either, so the presence of an average score shouldn't be affected by that.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  It's limited by time and other factors. If you haven't commented on anything for a considerable time then there aren't enough values to average. I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother. For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...
  - mrduncan 16y ago
    From the last release of news.arc (which may have been a while ago but should be somewhat close to what news.yc is running): ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes. ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier. https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301 https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301
noahc 16y ago
When I comment my goal is to have the most Karma per thread. In some ways its very Karmic in that my goal is to maximize all users Karma over my own individual Karma. I get really excited when a comment of mine results in multiple 20+ Karma comments because that means I'm really contributing.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

by mzl 16y ago

jasonkester 16y ago

First, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost. Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :) Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.

mzl 16y ago
Thanks. That comment was my biggest hitting one ever, so my average will probably jump quite a bit. Funny that it should be in a meta-karma thread. I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing. Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :) * Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.
- khafra 16y ago
  You started me thinking about ways to normalize average karma, but I haven't come up with one that makes me happy yet: - adjusting to other comments on the same post doesn't account for timing - adjusting for time after the post is gameable by necromancers - adjusting by the total karma of the post commented on is incomplete; it also needs some relation to the time lapse from posting to comment - penalizing short comments might help discourage snarky one-liners Are there browser plugins to give an adjusted average karma score this way, yet?
dtby 16y ago
Why, then, even bother checking their HN karma score, GitHub commits, WoW gear score or Stack Overflow reputation points? Either their comment is useful to you where you live today or its not. You don't have to justify your judgement by yet another subjective. (By a... checking... 3.4 karma/comment user who was sub-1.0/comment last week; not having changed his opinions or commenting style.)

dhimes 16y ago

Agreed. I find karma average of little interest. Unfortunately it does encourage a certain type of bad behavior in those who do. I can appreciate what pg is trying to achieve with it, but I don't think it's helped the site, and in fact has perhaps detracted from some conversations that "could have happened" except the people came late to the thread. I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there. The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.

bm98 16y ago

OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions? [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871

mzl 16y ago
I don't have any submission either, so the presence of an average score shouldn't be affected by that.
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
It's limited by time and other factors. If you haven't commented on anything for a considerable time then there aren't enough values to average. I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother. For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...
- mrduncan 16y ago
  From the last release of news.arc (which may have been a while ago but should be somewhat close to what news.yc is running): ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes. ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier. https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301 https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301

noahc 16y ago

When I comment my goal is to have the most Karma per thread. In some ways its very Karmic in that my goal is to maximize all users Karma over my own individual Karma. I get really excited when a comment of mine results in multiple 20+ Karma comments because that means I'm really contributing.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]