

Ask HN: Why should I care about HN Karma? - dpaluy

Is there are any benefits for users with high HN Karma?
There is a nice HN Karma Tracker I found: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/ and it nice.
But I didn't find any use for it yet.
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noinput
It's completely objective, just as Reddit's count, your Facebook friends, or
your Twitter followers. However, it helps in many ways when objectively
applied evaluating a person's involvement in the community and commenting
reputation.

If someone leaves a stark comment and had 10 points and 10 submissions, you
can guess they have a lot to learn about this community, however if you find
someone in the thousand's+ and has actively engaged in meaningful
conversation, you get a better idea on the intent of the commentator in
question.

Additionally, in the past when personally asking for advice (like this
thread), I've used that same logic to help better understand the true value of
opinions. I've also heard on two occasions from startup employers something
along the lines of "..but what's their HN score?".

Oh, and after a certain amount of Karma, you get down-vote ability.

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dpaluy
Thanks.

I think there is a lot todo with HN Karma. Several ideas: 1\. Sort posts by
karma 2\. Karma gamification a. Show 20 community members with karma score
near yours within a period (week/month). b. Weekly Karma challenges

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lsiebert
Karma, like any measurement of an individual's value is imperfect. I'd say
that it's not closely tied to a user's contributions to the site. And
seriously, abstracting something like it represents into one number is
problematic except with gross comparisons.

A well made comment in a discussion may get 4 - 6 points of karma. A link to
tech crunch article or blog post you had nothing to do with may get you 200+
points.

People upvote people they like, regardless of the value of the particular
comment. This means famous individuals tend to have more karma per post count.

I'd personally love more details on karma. especially karma from comments, as
separated from karma from posts.

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brudgers
Don't take should from anyone. It is fine not to care about HN karma.

Downvotes and upvotes can mean lots of different things - from expressions of
agreement/disagreement, to valid/invalid reasoning or facts, to somebody
commenting on my personality.

The first constructive view of karma I had was as editorial feedback on my
writing. If someone downvotes a comment, either I did not communicate my point
clearly, or I was mistaken, or it confirms I made my point exactly [I will
make comments that I suspect will be downvoted].

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tripzilch
From a practical point of view, at 500 karma you get the ability to downvote
comments. They may have changed this number by now though.

Otherwise, it's a marker signifying what people like that you wrote, and (for
downvotes) what people consider unacceptable on HN. That's the main signal I
get/give from downvotes: "I wish you hadn't posted that".

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_smaugh
Companies and recruiters searching for outstanding developers might filter
their search by users with interesting comments and submitions. In other words
high karma.

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nikai
I'm aware of two sites that use HN Karma for scoring their users:
workforpie.com and coderbits.com - there are probably more.

