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Hacker News Karma Tracker

179 points by freework 14y ago

MichaelApproved 14y ago
Why are the usernames case sensitive? michaelapproved is not a valid username when searching but MichaelApproved is. Does HN allow for different case usernames or is it something that was overlooked during development of the search feature?
- RKoutnik 14y ago
  HN overall has case-sensitive usernames. Drove me batty until I figured it out. You can ask pg why he went with that particular design choice.
  - martin-adams 14y ago
    Maybe there's no database and it's all just stored as files on a unix file system, thus inheriting the case sensitiveness.
    - dbaupp 14y ago
      Usernames could still be normalized to lower (or upper) case before creating/reading/writing the file. (Admittedly, the simplest method is without doing this.)
  - kens 14y ago
    Looking at the news.arc code, user profiles are stored as files in the directory arc/news/profile/, so the names there are case sensitive because of the underlying file system. The users are loaded into a map using the name as a key, and map lookups are case sensitive in Arc. Thus, both the on-disk and in-memory storage of users is case sensitive. Of course names could be converted to a case-insensitive form, but the "natural" implementation results in case-sensitivity. The code can be downloaded from http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar Note the code is from 2009 and didn't exactly match the running HN code at the time, so any conclusions from the published code aren't guaranteed. I did an analysis of the HN ranking formula back in 2009 - http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.html http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.h... - but the live formula is surely very different from the published code by now. And ironically, that article got about 0 upvotes so it didn't rank well :-)
wahnfrieden 14y ago
Is there an extension that will hide my karma from me? I habitually glance at it and it does me no good, it's just noise.
- umbrella 14y ago
  No good? It's supposed to encourage you to conform.
- niggler 14y ago
  I wonder if hiding the comment karma (now that it's been many months) has had a positive or negative impact ...
- nmcfarl 14y ago
  I've got a user CSS file that just colors that text the same color as the header. It's not perfect - for instance right now I'm on my iPad (no browser extensions) and I can see it - but it sure helps.
Xcelerate 14y ago
This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research... It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, because I tell myself I'm above accumulating imaginary points on the internet, but obviously, I don't seem to be. In some ways, it's curious. My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. EDIT: After thinking about it some more, I've decided karma isn't entirely worthless in real life. It is a metric that lets you know how well other people like your written work. Over time, I've slowly come to realize what will get upvoted and what will not. This ability could have interesting repercussions in the way I write about my research, or the way that I craft something like grant or fellowship applications. Every person is different, but posting on HN reveals to me that, in the aggregate, there are certain things you can say that have a certain appeal to others, and the capacity to recognize this could in fact be useful in many life situations.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  > My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. It doesn't seem surprising to me. It takes effort to recognize quality, most people aren't going to bother. It makes sense that quality is hard to measure, because if it weren't it would most likely be easier to produce. Perhaps the score should be corrected for length and how deep in the thread a comment is, but getting it right is probably more trouble than it's worth.
  - a_p 14y ago
    I think that it is hacker etiquette to only pass judgement when you are qualified to do so. This is why funny comments that don't require specialized knowledge are upvoted more than insightful comments. The Slashdot comment system tries to correct this by awarding karma to "interesting" or "insightful" comments and not giving karma points to users with "funny" comments. Of course, the downside to this is that the poster of a comment that many find to be funny can end up with bad karma because one "flamebait" mod counts for more than six "funny" mods. The problem with Slashdot is comments that are flat out wrong are often moderated as insightful. This probably happens because moderators feel obligated to upvote what they perceive to be "intelligent" comments even when they are not qualified to judge them as such.
martinced 14y ago
Cool... But it would be nice if all these "small" (not criticizing in any way here) websites allowed either query parameters in the URL or directly "short URLs" (like bit.ly etc.) so we could share links. (maybe I missed it?)
- eksith 14y ago
  Well, this site may not have it in short URL form, but if you do need to shorten something else without too much of a hassle, there are lots of bookmarklets out there : https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=short+url+bookmarklet https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=short+url+bookmark...
- mwill 14y ago
  Now that you mention it, it's sort of surprising that there's not a url for each user. It's not quite as useful, but a quick look at network activity shows the data gets pulled from /user/[name].json, like: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/user/martinced.json http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/user/martinced.json /user/[name] without the .json hits an error, unfortunately.
  - freework 14y ago
    You can now view the page without the .json and it should show the the data in a html page.
eksith 14y ago
It's just a number in a database. What you say and how you say it is more important than what other people think of it. If your words are important to you and you said them in earnest, why does it matter? Side note: You may even be unconsciously censoring yourself in fear of losing karma. It's a similar effect to suddenly having a lot of followers on Twitter.
- Udo 14y ago
  Sure, but karma is an important measurement of the (perceived) quality of your posts. If a comment gets upvoted that's not only because people agree with you but also because they think your comment has value. Likewise, if a comment gets downvoted, that's a fair indicator it did not have a lot of merit. Of course, HN distorts this somewhat by just having one score for all the possible reasons a user might have to vote on a comment, and inevitably superstar posters get upvoted reflexively often drowning out better comments. But overall, as both a tool for measuring quality and a reward system it works pretty well. By voting, we give each other points of a credibility currency that transcends individual discussions.
  - eksith 14y ago
    I just got a measurement of my post, simply because you replied. ;) Just by talking to me, you've let me know what I said was worth at least a reply. This is just opinion, so take it for what its worth... I'd much rather someone reply to me, email, chat whatever, and let me know what exactly they think rather than assign my words a value via a mouse click. Wouldn't you?
    - Udo 14y ago
      > I just got a measurement of my post, simply because you replied. ;) Yes, but I also upvoted you ;) I essentially agree with you, it's just that I think karma has its place, too. And usually when I reply to a comment, I make it a point to give it a vote as well.
    - nsns 14y ago
      You're confusing a single conversation with the ongoing presence on the forum. Karma is an imperfect but effective way of assessing a user's position within the community based on her/his previous actions and reactions. It can be looked at as a substitute to an auditory/visual first impression in the "real" world.
politician 14y ago
Why is aaronbrethorst ranked both 38 and 39 in the "Overall karma leaders" list?
- ghiculescu 14y ago
  mtgx is first and second on http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars, too.
  - freework 14y ago
    Thats because someone typed in that username with a trailing space character ("mtgx ") and it made a new entry for that username int eh database. Nothing a little .strip won't fix...
    - yesimahuman 14y ago
      For an account only 290 days old, mtgx has a ton of karma. Any idea who that is or where the karma comes from? Don't see many highly rated posts or comments in their feed.
      - biot 14y ago
        Submitting stories. Whoever submitted Bellard's jsLinux story received as much karma (3000+) for that one URL and title as I had from several years of comment writing.
      - mjn 14y ago
        He/she submits a lot of stories, so you won't find the highly rated ones if you go back only a page or two, but you can find them this way: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=mtgx&sortby=points+desc http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=mtg...
mjn 14y ago
Not sure if it's a bug or my browser is just too old, but on Safari 5.1.7 (OS X 10.6.8), the "See your Data" button doesn't do anything. Works fine in Chrome.
DanBC 14y ago
I like this! Is there any way of fitting some kind of averaging in there? There is karma per day, so perhaps posts per day? Also, (http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars) 98 and 99 appear to be duplicates.
thesis 14y ago
Neat. One thing I noticed though... my karma isn't correct even though it states it was last updated today. I haven't commented in almost a week prior to this comment.
- freework 14y ago
  The site pulls data from the HNSearch API, which only updates user's karma on their end when the user submits a post.
TommyDANGerous 14y ago
This is pretty cool haha, it tracks and it gives accurate data. Very very quickly to. Great job.
whalesalad 14y ago
The fact that this is not using Twitter Bootstrap makes me so happy. It's delightfully refreshing to see something that uses even just the barebones rails scaffolding styles.
pla3rhat3r 14y ago
SMH
dave1010uk 14y ago
Is it easy to separate karma aquired from submissions and karma aquired from comments? My average comment karma is below 3 and I've only had a few comments over 20 but most of my karma has come from 2 or 3 submissions of interesting links, which seems almost like cheating. I think the most karma I ever got was from being the first to post about Sublime Text 2. This was interesting but I only got the karma because I beat everyone else by a few seconds. I feel that's far less valuable than the odd thing I've spotted which no one else would have ever come across. In the same way, I wonder how many people have high karma just because they are one of the first to comment on popular submissions. Edit: typo (I wonder how proof reading my comment more would have affect my karma)
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Karma is nothing but an algorithmic parameter. I wouldn't think anything else of it.
rhapsodyv 14y ago
Very cool website!! I predict some people watching this site just to keep an eye on your position... It's tempting!
hu_me 14y ago
it lists total users as 11777 that looks like a very small number for hn which sends 10-20k visits if a site hits top spot. or are there a lot of lurkers who never signup?
- freework 14y ago
  Since HN doesn't publish a userlist, this site gets its data by crawling the "latest posts" HNSearch API every ten minutes. That 11,000 users includes all users who have made a post on HN since January 25th. Thats right, 11,000 unique users have means post on Hacker News in the past 2 weeks.
  - pyre 14y ago
    It's not entirely accurate because of this. HNSearch API allows you to list users ordered by karma. According to that, I'm ~120. According to this site, I'm 94. Heh.
  - hu_me 14y ago
    ah good to know. in that case 11k are the total active users in last 2 weeks. so going forward would your service retain data from 25 Jan onwards or only for the past 2weeks. I'd think that if it retains data from 25th within a few months it would be able to show a very good estimate of total active users
Alex3917 14y ago
It would be nice to see the list by comment karma only. That's the one list that I haven't actually seen anyone create so far.
- akkartik 14y ago
  Hard to do, now that comment scores are no longer public. I can also think of some useful analyses if user votes were public. It might also help control gaming by surfacing voting rings and so on.
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    "Hard to do, now that comment scores are no longer public." Submission scores are still public, so all you'd have to do is subtract submission karma from total karma.
    - dasil003 14y ago
      It's a hell of a lot more crawling though, given that old submissions can be upvoted indefinitely.
      - Alex3917 14y ago
        Fair enough, I don't think it would need to be updated more than every few months though.
tokenadult 14y ago
This was interesting initially, when I just "ego-surfed" it when the link was first submitted, because of the richness of the data displayed. It became more interesting, as the discussion here in this thread developed, when I realized I could look up any arbitrarily chosen user, for example the user who kindly submitted this link, freework, to see the same rich data for that user. The current user interface on Hacker News proper shows a leader board http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and discloses total karma and recent comment karma average on each user's user profile, e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult But this interface offers more, and prompts me to look up some fellow users to see what their detailed statistics look like. As I expected, cwan, who gains almost all of his karma from submissions rather than comments, has a higher percentile than anyone else who began participating here in the same month. AFTER EDIT: Link to an old discussion I tried to stir up, on a topic which other users are discussing in this thread, "Ask HN: What Kinds of Comments Should Be Upvoted?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084 I'm always interested in how to emphasize the positive by upvoting early and often when I see good stuff here, so I like to hear opinions from all of you about what is good stuff. P.S. By following the links from the submitted site, I am reminded that patio11 and I seem to have the same join date. I'm honored to be behind him in any ranking that includes the both of us.
Capricornucopia 14y ago
Does anyone have advice about improving my karma? I'm roughly 42nd percentile. I suppose lurking doesn't help.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Cynically: many stories are reposted. Discover what those are, and what the popular opinions on them are. Then monitor new, and make the popular comment early to reap most karma. Commenting at the right time seems to help. Having a single thought per post also helps; people tend to upvote if they agree with the entire post.
- untog 14y ago
  I know this is going to sound preachy, but the best way to improve your karma is probably to stop thinking about how to improve your karma. That is, just post your thoughts on a topic, written as best you can. At least, that's worked well for me and probably most other high percentile-ers. Don't start pandering to what you think will attract a lot of upvotes- karma is meaningless after all.
lisper 14y ago
I think you're missing an important metric: karma per submission. People with high KPS tend to be those who keep their mouths shut most of the time but when they do have something to say it's generally worth paying attention. I think this is the kind of behavior that really ought to be encouraged more than contributions per unit time. Also, the see-your-data feature fails on Safari.
- dougk16 14y ago
  Not sure if you strictly mean karma per submission, or karma per comment, or both. As for karma per comment at least, reaching a critical mass of absolute karma points seems to have a big impact on your KPC, regardless of the comment's content, thus partly invalidating the value of KPS/KPC. I just anecdotally see karma peasants post comments that are functionally identical to comments from the karma kings, and the peasants just get buried at the bottom. It would interesting to have some kind of NLP-based crawler go through HN and see to what extent that actually happens though...maybe it's just my imagination.
seferphier 14y ago
very cool piece of work. Would be even cooler if I could get stats of my most popular threads and comments. It would be also interesting to see pg's most popular thread and comment.
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  You can do this via hnsearch. pg's most popular comments: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=pg&sortby=points+desc http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=pg&#38...
akkartik 14y ago
The beta testers: https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/october-2006 https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/october-2006. I had no idea John Resig of jQuery fame is a YC alum. Then there's a gap of three months months before the early adopters: https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/february-2007 https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/february-2007.
- davidw 14y ago
  That's a neat list... a portion of those people were early adopters on reddit as well and a lot of the names look quite familiar. That makes 6 years of HN... time flies!
dfc 14y ago
I have always wondered what the top karma list would look like if it was broken down into two lists: comment karma and submission karma. Has anyone done this?
jaredsohn 14y ago
Some other stats that could be interesting: Show how many people / what percentage have 500 karma (which presumably is what it takes to downvote.) Show how much karma a person would currently need to be at the 25th, 50th, 66th, 75th, 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles (or whatever percentiles make sense).
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  The above computed manually (by looking at the monthly lists to finds users at various karma levels and determining their percentiles): Percentile for 500 karma: 73% Rough karma thresholds for percentiles: 25% 12 50% 110 66% 333 75% 575 90% 1760 95% 3100 99% 9700
motters 14y ago
Not that I care much about these karma values, but ideally something like this should be part the HN site itself.
robomartin 14y ago
The problem with karma implementations is that they don't always encode for the best outcome. I am not sure what karma means on HN. There are some topics where you could very easily fish for karma by going with the prevailing thoughts in any given community. Post against the grain and loose karma. It's fairly predictable in most communities. Then there are effects as I've seen in some of the Stack Exchange sites. One that comes to mind is ServerFault. Moderators and high-karma members with elevated privileges have turned that particular site into a nearly unusable and hostile environment for anyone outside a very narrow definition of what the "gang" wants. This is an interesting effect because it encodes what a few privileged users want as opposed to what --conjecture-- a larger majority might be looking for out of the site. And, from a strict business view of the problem it reduces that audience and the applicability of the site/s by a potentially significant factor. It's like having a mechanical engineering site where high-karma users have decided they only want to discuss hex bolts used by aircraft mechanics. You show-up to ask about hex bolts used on motorcycles and watch out! Perhaps the ultimate questions --on a site-per-site basis-- might be: - What's the design intent behind karma or user reputation? - What is it you want to encode? - How do you ensure that this is, in fact, encoded into the rating? - How do you prevent users from polluting or de-valuing karma through misinterpretation, petty/spiteful voting, "gang-like" behavior or other degenerations? - If karma is used to elevate user rights, how does it also affect responsibilities? Does it impose a level of accountability? - How do you keep karma "wars" from affecting your community? By this I mean gang-like behavior by regulars who'll attack outside their pack with the only tool they have, karma. - How to you keep karma from affecting site business? - Short of the benevolent dictator model, is there a better approach to encoding user value, participation or relevance? Not an easy problem to solve as most communities have discovered. For the most part HN seems to regulate rather nicely. We are all guilty of veering off here and there but eventually things come back to a reasonable center. Maybe it's because posts age very quickly and it takes a lot to stay in the first page or two. Other types of sites don't have that advantage.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Most interesting thing to me: this month is my fifth anniversary with an HN account. I actually started lurking before that, in the Startup News days, but I didn't really have anything to contribute until it broadened scope.
DanielRibeiro 14y ago
That is interesting. If you want more information on them, including photos and twitter info, you can see it on http://www.hnwho.com http://www.hnwho.com
tbatterii 14y ago
Sweet, now I can tell who the popular kids are.
xijuan 14y ago
I really like the website. I have currently got interested in getting more karmas. Anyone has any suggestion as to how to increase karmas quickly?
ColinWright 14y ago
No surprise, but it doesn't seem to work on the BlackBerry browser.
buzzkillr2 14y ago
Today I learn that I am not the worst karma gaining person from my registration month.
orangethirty 14y ago
This is a very good tool to track patterns in the community. Realize that each of the top 200 users represent a given demographic. If you see the change over time for each user, you can pinpoint those patterns and adjust to it (if you are selling something to that market). You can also quickly learn how to create your own organic circle of upvoters, so that your company posts hit the front page without needing to email everyone in your network so they can come in and upvote (which is do not approve of and not do). Its good to create your own niche audience inside such a powerful community like this one.
tzury 14y ago
pg (129961) As of: Mon Feb 04 2013 07:34:16 GMT+0200 (IST) Among all active users Total users: 13431 Total users with less karma: 13430 Your rank: 1st Overall karma percentile: 100.00% Average karma increase per day: 56.260 Total users with slower increasing karma: 13427 Your speed rank: 4th Speed percentile: 99.98% Among active users from your registration month (October 2006) Total users: 9 Total users with less karma than you: 8 Your rank: 1st Percentile: 100.00%

179 points by freework 14y ago

Why are the usernames case sensitive? michaelapproved is not a valid username when searching but MichaelApproved is. Does HN allow for different case usernames or is it something that was overlooked during development of the search feature?

RKoutnik 14y ago
HN overall has case-sensitive usernames. Drove me batty until I figured it out. You can ask pg why he went with that particular design choice.
- martin-adams 14y ago
  Maybe there's no database and it's all just stored as files on a unix file system, thus inheriting the case sensitiveness.
  - dbaupp 14y ago
    Usernames could still be normalized to lower (or upper) case before creating/reading/writing the file. (Admittedly, the simplest method is without doing this.)
- kens 14y ago
  Looking at the news.arc code, user profiles are stored as files in the directory arc/news/profile/, so the names there are case sensitive because of the underlying file system. The users are loaded into a map using the name as a key, and map lookups are case sensitive in Arc. Thus, both the on-disk and in-memory storage of users is case sensitive. Of course names could be converted to a case-insensitive form, but the "natural" implementation results in case-sensitivity. The code can be downloaded from http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar Note the code is from 2009 and didn't exactly match the running HN code at the time, so any conclusions from the published code aren't guaranteed. I did an analysis of the HN ranking formula back in 2009 - http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.html http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.h... - but the live formula is surely very different from the published code by now. And ironically, that article got about 0 upvotes so it didn't rank well :-)

wahnfrieden 14y ago

Is there an extension that will hide my karma from me? I habitually glance at it and it does me no good, it's just noise.

umbrella 14y ago
No good? It's supposed to encourage you to conform.
niggler 14y ago
I wonder if hiding the comment karma (now that it's been many months) has had a positive or negative impact ...
nmcfarl 14y ago
I've got a user CSS file that just colors that text the same color as the header. It's not perfect - for instance right now I'm on my iPad (no browser extensions) and I can see it - but it sure helps.

Xcelerate 14y ago

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research... It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, because I tell myself I'm above accumulating imaginary points on the internet, but obviously, I don't seem to be. In some ways, it's curious. My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. EDIT: After thinking about it some more, I've decided karma isn't entirely worthless in real life. It is a metric that lets you know how well other people like your written work. Over time, I've slowly come to realize what will get upvoted and what will not. This ability could have interesting repercussions in the way I write about my research, or the way that I craft something like grant or fellowship applications. Every person is different, but posting on HN reveals to me that, in the aggregate, there are certain things you can say that have a certain appeal to others, and the capacity to recognize this could in fact be useful in many life situations.

andreasvc 14y ago
> My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. It doesn't seem surprising to me. It takes effort to recognize quality, most people aren't going to bother. It makes sense that quality is hard to measure, because if it weren't it would most likely be easier to produce. Perhaps the score should be corrected for length and how deep in the thread a comment is, but getting it right is probably more trouble than it's worth.
- a_p 14y ago
  I think that it is hacker etiquette to only pass judgement when you are qualified to do so. This is why funny comments that don't require specialized knowledge are upvoted more than insightful comments. The Slashdot comment system tries to correct this by awarding karma to "interesting" or "insightful" comments and not giving karma points to users with "funny" comments. Of course, the downside to this is that the poster of a comment that many find to be funny can end up with bad karma because one "flamebait" mod counts for more than six "funny" mods. The problem with Slashdot is comments that are flat out wrong are often moderated as insightful. This probably happens because moderators feel obligated to upvote what they perceive to be "intelligent" comments even when they are not qualified to judge them as such.

martinced 14y ago

Cool... But it would be nice if all these "small" (not criticizing in any way here) websites allowed either query parameters in the URL or directly "short URLs" (like bit.ly etc.) so we could share links. (maybe I missed it?)

eksith 14y ago
Well, this site may not have it in short URL form, but if you do need to shorten something else without too much of a hassle, there are lots of bookmarklets out there : https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=short+url+bookmarklet https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=short+url+bookmark...
mwill 14y ago
Now that you mention it, it's sort of surprising that there's not a url for each user. It's not quite as useful, but a quick look at network activity shows the data gets pulled from /user/[name].json, like: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/user/martinced.json http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/user/martinced.json /user/[name] without the .json hits an error, unfortunately.
- freework 14y ago
  You can now view the page without the .json and it should show the the data in a html page.

eksith 14y ago

It's just a number in a database. What you say and how you say it is more important than what other people think of it. If your words are important to you and you said them in earnest, why does it matter? Side note: You may even be unconsciously censoring yourself in fear of losing karma. It's a similar effect to suddenly having a lot of followers on Twitter.

Udo 14y ago
Sure, but karma is an important measurement of the (perceived) quality of your posts. If a comment gets upvoted that's not only because people agree with you but also because they think your comment has value. Likewise, if a comment gets downvoted, that's a fair indicator it did not have a lot of merit. Of course, HN distorts this somewhat by just having one score for all the possible reasons a user might have to vote on a comment, and inevitably superstar posters get upvoted reflexively often drowning out better comments. But overall, as both a tool for measuring quality and a reward system it works pretty well. By voting, we give each other points of a credibility currency that transcends individual discussions.
- eksith 14y ago
  I just got a measurement of my post, simply because you replied. ;) Just by talking to me, you've let me know what I said was worth at least a reply. This is just opinion, so take it for what its worth... I'd much rather someone reply to me, email, chat whatever, and let me know what exactly they think rather than assign my words a value via a mouse click. Wouldn't you?
  - Udo 14y ago
    > I just got a measurement of my post, simply because you replied. ;) Yes, but I also upvoted you ;) I essentially agree with you, it's just that I think karma has its place, too. And usually when I reply to a comment, I make it a point to give it a vote as well.
  - nsns 14y ago
    You're confusing a single conversation with the ongoing presence on the forum. Karma is an imperfect but effective way of assessing a user's position within the community based on her/his previous actions and reactions. It can be looked at as a substitute to an auditory/visual first impression in the "real" world.

politician 14y ago

Why is aaronbrethorst ranked both 38 and 39 in the "Overall karma leaders" list?

ghiculescu 14y ago
mtgx is first and second on http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars, too.
- freework 14y ago
  Thats because someone typed in that username with a trailing space character ("mtgx ") and it made a new entry for that username int eh database. Nothing a little .strip won't fix...
  - yesimahuman 14y ago
    For an account only 290 days old, mtgx has a ton of karma. Any idea who that is or where the karma comes from? Don't see many highly rated posts or comments in their feed.
    - biot 14y ago
      Submitting stories. Whoever submitted Bellard's jsLinux story received as much karma (3000+) for that one URL and title as I had from several years of comment writing.
    - mjn 14y ago
      He/she submits a lot of stories, so you won't find the highly rated ones if you go back only a page or two, but you can find them this way: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=mtgx&sortby=points+desc http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=mtg...

mjn 14y ago

Not sure if it's a bug or my browser is just too old, but on Safari 5.1.7 (OS X 10.6.8), the "See your Data" button doesn't do anything. Works fine in Chrome.

DanBC 14y ago

I like this! Is there any way of fitting some kind of averaging in there? There is karma per day, so perhaps posts per day? Also, (http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars) 98 and 99 appear to be duplicates.

thesis 14y ago

Neat. One thing I noticed though... my karma isn't correct even though it states it was last updated today. I haven't commented in almost a week prior to this comment.

freework 14y ago
The site pulls data from the HNSearch API, which only updates user's karma on their end when the user submits a post.

TommyDANGerous 14y ago

This is pretty cool haha, it tracks and it gives accurate data. Very very quickly to. Great job.

whalesalad 14y ago

The fact that this is not using Twitter Bootstrap makes me so happy. It's delightfully refreshing to see something that uses even just the barebones rails scaffolding styles.

pla3rhat3r 14y ago

SMH

dave1010uk 14y ago

Is it easy to separate karma aquired from submissions and karma aquired from comments? My average comment karma is below 3 and I've only had a few comments over 20 but most of my karma has come from 2 or 3 submissions of interesting links, which seems almost like cheating. I think the most karma I ever got was from being the first to post about Sublime Text 2. This was interesting but I only got the karma because I beat everyone else by a few seconds. I feel that's far less valuable than the odd thing I've spotted which no one else would have ever come across. In the same way, I wonder how many people have high karma just because they are one of the first to comment on popular submissions. Edit: typo (I wonder how proof reading my comment more would have affect my karma)

kmfrk 14y ago
Karma is nothing but an algorithmic parameter. I wouldn't think anything else of it.

rhapsodyv 14y ago

Very cool website!! I predict some people watching this site just to keep an eye on your position... It's tempting!

hu_me 14y ago

it lists total users as 11777 that looks like a very small number for hn which sends 10-20k visits if a site hits top spot. or are there a lot of lurkers who never signup?

freework 14y ago
Since HN doesn't publish a userlist, this site gets its data by crawling the "latest posts" HNSearch API every ten minutes. That 11,000 users includes all users who have made a post on HN since January 25th. Thats right, 11,000 unique users have means post on Hacker News in the past 2 weeks.
- pyre 14y ago
  It's not entirely accurate because of this. HNSearch API allows you to list users ordered by karma. According to that, I'm ~120. According to this site, I'm 94. Heh.
- hu_me 14y ago
  ah good to know. in that case 11k are the total active users in last 2 weeks. so going forward would your service retain data from 25 Jan onwards or only for the past 2weeks. I'd think that if it retains data from 25th within a few months it would be able to show a very good estimate of total active users

Alex3917 14y ago

It would be nice to see the list by comment karma only. That's the one list that I haven't actually seen anyone create so far.

akkartik 14y ago
Hard to do, now that comment scores are no longer public. I can also think of some useful analyses if user votes were public. It might also help control gaming by surfacing voting rings and so on.
- Alex3917 14y ago
  "Hard to do, now that comment scores are no longer public." Submission scores are still public, so all you'd have to do is subtract submission karma from total karma.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    It's a hell of a lot more crawling though, given that old submissions can be upvoted indefinitely.
    - Alex3917 14y ago
      Fair enough, I don't think it would need to be updated more than every few months though.

tokenadult 14y ago

This was interesting initially, when I just "ego-surfed" it when the link was first submitted, because of the richness of the data displayed. It became more interesting, as the discussion here in this thread developed, when I realized I could look up any arbitrarily chosen user, for example the user who kindly submitted this link, freework, to see the same rich data for that user. The current user interface on Hacker News proper shows a leader board http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and discloses total karma and recent comment karma average on each user's user profile, e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult But this interface offers more, and prompts me to look up some fellow users to see what their detailed statistics look like. As I expected, cwan, who gains almost all of his karma from submissions rather than comments, has a higher percentile than anyone else who began participating here in the same month. AFTER EDIT: Link to an old discussion I tried to stir up, on a topic which other users are discussing in this thread, "Ask HN: What Kinds of Comments Should Be Upvoted?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084 I'm always interested in how to emphasize the positive by upvoting early and often when I see good stuff here, so I like to hear opinions from all of you about what is good stuff. P.S. By following the links from the submitted site, I am reminded that patio11 and I seem to have the same join date. I'm honored to be behind him in any ranking that includes the both of us.

Capricornucopia 14y ago

Does anyone have advice about improving my karma? I'm roughly 42nd percentile. I suppose lurking doesn't help.

DanBC 14y ago
Cynically: many stories are reposted. Discover what those are, and what the popular opinions on them are. Then monitor new, and make the popular comment early to reap most karma. Commenting at the right time seems to help. Having a single thought per post also helps; people tend to upvote if they agree with the entire post.
untog 14y ago
I know this is going to sound preachy, but the best way to improve your karma is probably to stop thinking about how to improve your karma. That is, just post your thoughts on a topic, written as best you can. At least, that's worked well for me and probably most other high percentile-ers. Don't start pandering to what you think will attract a lot of upvotes- karma is meaningless after all.

lisper 14y ago

I think you're missing an important metric: karma per submission. People with high KPS tend to be those who keep their mouths shut most of the time but when they do have something to say it's generally worth paying attention. I think this is the kind of behavior that really ought to be encouraged more than contributions per unit time. Also, the see-your-data feature fails on Safari.

dougk16 14y ago
Not sure if you strictly mean karma per submission, or karma per comment, or both. As for karma per comment at least, reaching a critical mass of absolute karma points seems to have a big impact on your KPC, regardless of the comment's content, thus partly invalidating the value of KPS/KPC. I just anecdotally see karma peasants post comments that are functionally identical to comments from the karma kings, and the peasants just get buried at the bottom. It would interesting to have some kind of NLP-based crawler go through HN and see to what extent that actually happens though...maybe it's just my imagination.

seferphier 14y ago

very cool piece of work. Would be even cooler if I could get stats of my most popular threads and comments. It would be also interesting to see pg's most popular thread and comment.

jaredsohn 14y ago
You can do this via hnsearch. pg's most popular comments: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=pg&sortby=points+desc http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=pg&#38...

akkartik 14y ago

The beta testers: https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/october-2006 https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/october-2006. I had no idea John Resig of jQuery fame is a YC alum. Then there's a gap of three months months before the early adopters: https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/february-2007 https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/february-2007.

davidw 14y ago
That's a neat list... a portion of those people were early adopters on reddit as well and a lot of the names look quite familiar. That makes 6 years of HN... time flies!

dfc 14y ago

I have always wondered what the top karma list would look like if it was broken down into two lists: comment karma and submission karma. Has anyone done this?

jaredsohn 14y ago

Some other stats that could be interesting: Show how many people / what percentage have 500 karma (which presumably is what it takes to downvote.) Show how much karma a person would currently need to be at the 25th, 50th, 66th, 75th, 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles (or whatever percentiles make sense).

jaredsohn 14y ago
The above computed manually (by looking at the monthly lists to finds users at various karma levels and determining their percentiles): Percentile for 500 karma: 73% Rough karma thresholds for percentiles: 25% 12 50% 110 66% 333 75% 575 90% 1760 95% 3100 99% 9700

motters 14y ago

Not that I care much about these karma values, but ideally something like this should be part the HN site itself.

robomartin 14y ago

The problem with karma implementations is that they don't always encode for the best outcome. I am not sure what karma means on HN. There are some topics where you could very easily fish for karma by going with the prevailing thoughts in any given community. Post against the grain and loose karma. It's fairly predictable in most communities. Then there are effects as I've seen in some of the Stack Exchange sites. One that comes to mind is ServerFault. Moderators and high-karma members with elevated privileges have turned that particular site into a nearly unusable and hostile environment for anyone outside a very narrow definition of what the "gang" wants. This is an interesting effect because it encodes what a few privileged users want as opposed to what --conjecture-- a larger majority might be looking for out of the site. And, from a strict business view of the problem it reduces that audience and the applicability of the site/s by a potentially significant factor. It's like having a mechanical engineering site where high-karma users have decided they only want to discuss hex bolts used by aircraft mechanics. You show-up to ask about hex bolts used on motorcycles and watch out! Perhaps the ultimate questions --on a site-per-site basis-- might be: - What's the design intent behind karma or user reputation? - What is it you want to encode? - How do you ensure that this is, in fact, encoded into the rating? - How do you prevent users from polluting or de-valuing karma through misinterpretation, petty/spiteful voting, "gang-like" behavior or other degenerations? - If karma is used to elevate user rights, how does it also affect responsibilities? Does it impose a level of accountability? - How do you keep karma "wars" from affecting your community? By this I mean gang-like behavior by regulars who'll attack outside their pack with the only tool they have, karma. - How to you keep karma from affecting site business? - Short of the benevolent dictator model, is there a better approach to encoding user value, participation or relevance? Not an easy problem to solve as most communities have discovered. For the most part HN seems to regulate rather nicely. We are all guilty of veering off here and there but eventually things come back to a reasonable center. Maybe it's because posts age very quickly and it takes a lot to stay in the first page or two. Other types of sites don't have that advantage.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

Most interesting thing to me: this month is my fifth anniversary with an HN account. I actually started lurking before that, in the Startup News days, but I didn't really have anything to contribute until it broadened scope.

DanielRibeiro 14y ago

That is interesting. If you want more information on them, including photos and twitter info, you can see it on http://www.hnwho.com http://www.hnwho.com

tbatterii 14y ago

Sweet, now I can tell who the popular kids are.

xijuan 14y ago

I really like the website. I have currently got interested in getting more karmas. Anyone has any suggestion as to how to increase karmas quickly?

ColinWright 14y ago

No surprise, but it doesn't seem to work on the BlackBerry browser.

buzzkillr2 14y ago

Today I learn that I am not the worst karma gaining person from my registration month.

orangethirty 14y ago

This is a very good tool to track patterns in the community. Realize that each of the top 200 users represent a given demographic. If you see the change over time for each user, you can pinpoint those patterns and adjust to it (if you are selling something to that market). You can also quickly learn how to create your own organic circle of upvoters, so that your company posts hit the front page without needing to email everyone in your network so they can come in and upvote (which is do not approve of and not do). Its good to create your own niche audience inside such a powerful community like this one.

tzury 14y ago

pg (129961) As of: Mon Feb 04 2013 07:34:16 GMT+0200 (IST) Among all active users Total users: 13431 Total users with less karma: 13430 Your rank: 1st Overall karma percentile: 100.00% Average karma increase per day: 56.260 Total users with slower increasing karma: 13427 Your speed rank: 4th Speed percentile: 99.98% Among active users from your registration month (October 2006) Total users: 9 Total users with less karma than you: 8 Your rank: 1st Percentile: 100.00%