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Average karma is a very poor metric, and I found that my usage of HN changed drastically when pg started showing it more prominently. One optimizes for average
by necubi 15y ago
Average karma is a very poor metric, and I found that my usage of HN changed drastically when pg started showing it more prominently. One optimizes for average karma by not commenting on stories that are older or less popular, as those are likely to produce a 1 or 2 rating due to lack of eyeballs. However such comments are often interesting and useful contributions, and it hurts HN to discourage them.
A possible solution is to scale by the number of people who look at the comment, although this might be difficult to do well. You could probably get better results by estimating a regression containing the following variables: age of post, score of post, number of comments, average score of comments in the thread, and the depth of the tree in which the comment was posted to get a good determination of how many points an average comment in that situation would get.
- Bud 15y agoYou're assuming that all/most users are trying to achieve maximal average karma, even at the cost of getting to comment on what they feel like voting on. This seems like a rather poor assumption to me. For instance, am I mindful of not having an avg. karma that makes me look like a twit? Sure. But do I let that keep me from posting comments that I wish to post, just because I fear they will get low ratings? No, I know that things will tend to work out overall, because from what I've observed, if you make an honest effort to not be a total idiot on here, you will end up with a decent rating. I trust the userbase, basically. It saddens me that so many users here, apparently including some of the site's creators and authority figures, seem to lack such faith to an extent that makes them want to hide features of the site from the userbase, even though a strong majority of the userbase says they want to see those features, in poll after poll, without exception. I understand that the users are not always right, and that one can often achieve better results from ignoring the userbase. I just don't think this is one of those times.
- Meai 15y agoYou trust an unknown number of users of unknown quality that could decrease or increase by an unknown amount of unknown users of unknown quality at any time.
- Jd 15y agoIt is not only shown more prominently, it is listed as a factor considered when evaluating applications. So if evne if you don't care, PG apparently does. I started to. I followed a multi-prong strategy and increased my karma from ~2 / post to ~4 / post over the course of about 4 months. Things I (mostly) stopped doing: (1) Carrying on personal conversations or debates about a specific topic. (2) Commenting on controversial topics, esp. with an opinion that might not be in the mainstream of HN readers (3) Commenting on things more than an hour or two old (4) Commenting on items that already have a lot of comments and points where I expect that my comments will not get noticed. I also find it sad that I have to consider such a thing... ...but it works.
- pg 15y agoI also find it sad that I have to consider such a thing You don't. I don't care about average comment scores, just whether I recognize a username for consistently saying intelligent things.
- Jd 15y agoIt is fascinating and somewhat shocking to me that in the large applicant pool that you would be able to recognize a substantial number of applicants on the basis of their HN handles. Does this really happen? My gut tells me in a pool of 400 or so applicants you might recognize about 40 handles, with a recollection of comment quality in about half of those. Which is to say, comment quality has bearing in about 5% of applicants and virtually always positively.
- pg 15y agocomment quality has bearing in about 5% of applicants and virtually always positively That's roughly correct, yes.