4 ms·
That's not an observation, it's a conjecture, and one that is fairly baseless. many things operate according to a power law. If karma is like that, a small numb
by raganwald 14y ago
That's not an observation, it's a conjecture, and one that is fairly baseless. many things operate according to a power law. If karma is like that, a small number of users will end up with a shitload of karma points even if they aren't attempting to game the system.
There are many factors that could contribute to a power law for karma distribution. One conjecture is that other users tend to "trust" high-karma users and therefore tend to upvote their comments just because they have high karma.
Another is that high-karma users receive gratification from using HN and therefore use it more. Which leads to getting more karma.
Either of the two conjectures I advanced could explain a small number of users having a disproportionate amount of Karma.
- jacquesm 14y agoKarma is pretty much directly related to how much time you spend on HN, and not much else.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- elisehein 14y agoYou could easily follow every single story without ever commenting on any of them.. Not to mention the amount of unregistered users
- darkarmani 14y agoBy not coming to HN very often, it's pretty much guaranteed that you won't have high karma.
- tptacek 14y agoBoth conjectures bear out in my experience. A third one: High-karma users have followers. I've left comments on very old stories in out-of-the-way places and found them voted up. So we accumulate karma faster in part because people are simply more likely to see our posts, because they go out of their way to do so.
- larrys 14y agoA fourth - high karma people have a halo effect (while that sounds a little like one of the others ones mentioned) I think it's distinct. I had an experience the other week with the halo effect as follows. I was somewhere and struck up a conversation with a man that I believed to be the actual head of a top 10 law firm in the US (a distant relative who I met for the first time). With a private jet, home in Aspen and a few thousand lawyers under him. While I was talking to him, I was noticeably aware of literally how important he seemed on one hand, and how "down to earth" he seemed on the other. (He actually didn't seem that sharp to go with who I believed him to be, in a George Bush kind of way.) But the halo was still there (I was doubting my instincts all along). After speaking to him for 45 minutes or so I asked for his card. It turned out that he wasn't the head of the firm, he was the son of the head of the firm (he was a senior partner none the less).
- lotharbot 14y agoYour own profile provides an excellent example of this phenomenon -- you have a "must-read list". Valuable contributions from the past mean certain people get noticed more in the present.
- fudged71 14y agoThe popularity of contrarian viewpoints on sites like HN and reddit are absolutely because people reward people more for expressing those views. Even just as a trend, it is worth considering.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- redthrowaway 14y agoI don't know; consciously recognizing this tendency in myself is one of the reasons I deleted my reddit account and seriously scaled back my contribution here. I observed behaviour in myself that I found distasteful, but it wasn't before that behaviour had become entrenched and I had become a top-100 poster on HN (by overall karma) that I noticed it. I can easily postulate a reality wherein others, as I did, unconsciously adopt hivemind opinions so as to maximize the social validation of karma without realizing that they're doing so or intentionally gaming the system in that way.