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Hacker News Karma Superstars
- q_revert 13y agowhat might also be interesting is to see how karma is accrued.. from a huge number of submissions, or from a large number of insightful comments, or what the breakdown is.. for example, i've made two submissions, both making it to the #1 spot, and have been afraid to submit any more lest my streak be ended some measure of quality over quantity would be nice :)
- minimaxir 13y agoUnfortunately, Comment Karma is not available publically. (Unless you tried to do Total Karma - Karma from submitted Links) Why doesn't HN distinguish between Link Karma and Comment Karma a la Reddit anyways?
- josh2600 13y agoBecause HN is written in ARC which is somewhat tedious and not well known except by people like PG who don't have time to fix HN.
- DuskStar 13y agoI think he means more "Total Comment Karma / Total Comments", to see if the top users get, say, 3 karma per comment, but average 20+ comments/day. Or if they post relatively few comments, but really high-quality ones.
- dfc 13y agoI am not very interested in karma, and part of the reason is that there is no distinction between comment karma and submission karma. I don't think that being the first to submit an interesting link should be comparable to being the first person to submit an interesting comment. But that's because I come here for the discussions. I imagine that people who come here for new links and never browse the discussions feel differently.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThis is something that it would be interesting for these guys to separate out. There are clearly a number of accounts which just submit everything from various 'known to hit' blogs/sites, there are some that submit what ever was a high scoring article a year ago, Etc etc. What I find amusing is that since they are essentially playing a game "karma scoring for fun" they complain about it when someone else's submission of the same story gets more karma than they got. That said the use of a mechanism like karma points to drive user engagement and participation is pretty classic. You could ask someone to spend hours day scouring the internet for interesting stories but they would want you to pay them. Offer up karma points to the people who find the cool stories and suddenly they are competing for free to populate the news feed for your site.
- ginsong 13y agoYou can see comment karma, but only after about a week, using the search box at the bottom of the page. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=tptacek&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=260 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=tptacek&s...
- sivam 13y agoYes you are correct. Most of the posters on that list are very prolific posters. It's relatively easy to get karma if you spend 10 hours on HN and immediately submit the latest breaking news or post 50 posts a day. A top list of average karma per post would be a better metric(assuming it doesn't count karma for articles).
- mturmon 13y agoAbout half my highest-karma comments have been pithy dismissals, humorous asides, planting flags on hot-button nontechnical posts, etc. -- insubstantial stuff. 14 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5646078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5646078 6 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633037 I'm not saying karma is worthless, but high-karma comments are skewed by jackpots obtained from fluff.
- kbenson 13y agoI wonder how much of the karma for the insubstantial stuff is actually a response to not being able to down vote. When you can't down vote, seeing a reply that sheds new light, puts some of the ridiculousness in context, or just takes a person down a notch may get a vote because it's your best way of voting by proxy. For the comment writer it's a bit of a double edged sword. Sometimes the feedback you get relative to the time and effort put into a post can be disheartening.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- swombat 13y agotptacek is clearly a fake account! No one can post that much upvoted stuff for such a long, sustained period. Someone ban him!
- sneak 13y agoIt's almost as if he exactly followed his own advice about growing a business, and now has the free time to sit around commenting on HN all day. Bots these days. :D
- chc 13y agoWait, tptacek gave advice about growing a business? I thought he just preached the ills of DNSSEC and homebrew cryptosystems. EDIT: Oh no, my karma superstardom!
- tptacek 13y agoI wish there were more DNSSEC threads because I do not feel like I have run out of bad things to say about DNSSEC.
- tptacek 13y agoI asked to get taken off the leaderboard! It's frankly embarrassing. Obviously, my karma score doesn't mean anything anymore; it's a function of name recognition, of the fact that I happen to post in a style (rambling paragraphs) that HN rewards, of the fact that I comment a lot, of the fact that I try to keep myself confined to topics where I have a lot of background knowledge, and of the fact that people follow my comments. There's nothing to learn about me at all from my karma score. From my comment frequency, sure: you'd learn that I comment a lot. I don't IRC, I don't game, and I no longer blog; I treat HN like I used to treat Usenet. Also, we hire from HN, and so I have a Pavlovian thing going on with commenting. Every once in awhile I consider switching to "tptacek_" or something, but that's just giving the embarrassing karma score more power over my life. I liked Slashdot's approach to this, which was (when I was there) that above a threshold your score just became "Lots".
- sneak 13y agoThese 50/day numbers are really disheartening. I thought I was doing well with 10/day (recently, not lifetime), and I'm not even on there.
- josh2600 13y agoIf you're counting imaginary points on the Internet you'll always be disheartened. HackerNews has never been about Karma for me. I'm here for educated discussion. As soon as this site ceases to be the forefront of intelligent technical discussion on the Internet, I'll bounce, but I care much more about discussion than Karma, which is worth reiterating. Karma has no value, but the strength of your arguments carry weight.
- thekevan 13y ago>If you're counting imaginary points on the Internet you'll always be disheartened. I see a number next to my name, the points are real. Not imagined. However I see the points as like video game scores. They are not terribly important even among ordinary issues, but still fun to keep an eye on once in a while. It's neat but not important.
- josh2600 13y agoIt's all just 0's and 1's buddy.
- icebraining 13y agoNo, that's just the medium used to transport the information.
- brudgers 13y agoSome days, I am above it. Others, I am working it. And sometimes the meaning I attach catches me unaware. A few months ago, I was dead dog down. Two projects had gone to shit, an out of town trip got cancelled, and I was enduring some wanton meanness along one vector of my social life. I was having a particularly bad day. And as stupid as it sounds, seeing a bump in points at the end of the day was hugely positive. All the other shit was bigger and more important. But in the moment, those few points had more value...and then I realized how much I love my family and friends and karma points faded back to normal. Karma scores embody whatever meaning we attach to them. For me, that meaning varies over time.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nealabq 13y agoThe users karma and karmawhore respectively have 1 and 15 karma. Shows you can't judge a book by its cover.
- Gertig 13y agoVery nice! I'd love to have a link from each user's page back to their profile page on HN.
- hawkharris 13y agoI'm fascinated by the psychology behind online rating systems. Honestly, they are big motivators for me. I get a burst of endorphins when I receive many Facebook "likes" or upvotes on HackerNews. When I am ignored or downvoted, I feel as if I've been voted out of a digital democracy. What's interesting, though, is that many online rating systems aren't democracies; they're dictatorships. In other words, it's unclear to the user how the process of ranking / rating actually works. (HN is pretty transparent, I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this regard.)
- bluetidepro 13y ago> "HN is pretty transparent, I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this regard." Don't you mean vice-versa? Facebook is completely obvious, and HN is the one that isn't at all. On Facebook I can easily see if I have 5 'Likes', which 5 people 'Liked' it. On HN, I have no idea why/who/where/etc the up-votes are coming from, or how they are weighted in various ways based on who actually up-voted you. It's the opposite of transparent. It's just a number with an up and down arrow. With Facebook, there is obvious measures by seeing the number of comments (and by who), the number of 'Likes' (and by who), and so forth. Not sure I follow your logic on that, unless you just accidentally reversed your sentence. EDIT: I was thinking more in terms of "Upvotes/Likes". I see what OP might mean now from the standpoint of Facebook logic on what content you actually see, and that side of things.
- cryptoz 13y agoHN is open source. Do you want to know how posts rise to the top? Go read the code. Do you want to know how Facebook determines what content you see? You could be a criminal, a felon, if you try to find out their algorithms (how do you do that, hack their servers?). I'm not the OP, but that might be the direction the original logic was going.
- bluetidepro 13y agoAh, okay. I suppose I mis-read what he meant by that statement. I see what the OP might mean now when you bring up the Facebook logic on what content you see, and that side of things. I was thinking more in terms of "Upvotes/Likes".
- swah 13y agoOdd, never seen a comment from Lightning.
- Peroni 13y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Lightning https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Lightning - Click on comments. There are plenty.
- jaredsohn 13y agoAlmost all of that account's karma comes from articles rather than comments: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=by%3ALightning&sortby=points+desc https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=by%3ALigh... vs https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=by%3ALightning&sortby=points+desc&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=by%3AL... The user has posted only one comments in the last 21 days and the highest rated comment ever had only 8 points.
- austinl 13y agoTo compete with Lightning, it looks like you have to submit content 1-4 times per day. Most submissions only get a few points. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Lightning https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Lightning
- HyprMusic 13y agoWould be great if it linked to the user's profiles.
- dfc 13y agoGiant pet peeves: I cant bookmark an individual user's page and I cant jump from a user's page to their profile page on HN.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tokenadult 13y agoSearching around with HN Search after seeing this thread reminded me of this comment by tptacek about Wikipedia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720 which is very, very good. P.S. I will always be behind one person who has the same join date I have, namely patio11, in both daily karma accumulation over time and total accumulated karma. And very deservedly so. I go looking for patio11's comments https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11 just in case I missed a few while browsing threads from the front page and the new page.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoI disagree. I think that's not one of tptacek's better comments. He uses ad-hom to support his (probably correct) evaluation that the person/subject of the OP was not notable enough for a Wikipedia article. While ignoring / distracting from the more important points about very real problems with the administration of Wikipedia. The mere fact that many of the proposed additions to Wikipedia are junk is not proof that all additions that get deleted by admins are junk. To his credit, at least he boldly confesses in that post to being a ranting windbag (his words). And to be clear, the real problem in this particular case is not with tptacek's comment, but that HN'ers probably just blindly upvoted his post because it was his, or because it appealed to their own bias, not because it was any good.
- tokenadult 13y agoI think the comment is good because it responds to a frequent misconception about Wikipedia seen here on HN (I am a Wikipedian of several years' experience, and I have to live with those issues), not at all because tptacek (who has also been a Wikipedian) posted it. I would have upvoted that comment for its little-known (here) content no matter who posted it. It's a fair point that there have been other comments in other threads about Wikipedia here on HN. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Wikipedian+by%3Atokenadult&sortby=points+desc&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Wikipedia...
- tptacek 13y ago
- lettergram 13y agoPersonally, I know I am not too interested in this. I have seen somewhere upwards of 100 posts up voted on snowden to the front page, yet only about 5 with new content. Point being, although you can get a lot of up votes by posting "hot" topics, I know for a fact there are interesting (many times more interesting) posts that never make it near the top posts.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoMaybe I'm in the minority, but I generally don't look at people's usernames. When I do its usually only to see if it matches the name of the submitter. Do people really judge here based HN micro-celebrity-ness?