

Ask YC: How important are HN contribution to YC applications? - bkbleikamp

Do people's contributions to Hacker News have weight in the decision if all else is equal?
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pg
Yes, at least in getting from the application to the interview phase. What
matters is not so much the karma score as whether we recognise the username as
someone who often submits good links or makes intelligent comments.

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dangoldin
Maybe that's an opportunity to revamp the way karma is done?

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pg
Believe me, if I could think of a way to make karma more accurately reflect
the value of comments, I'd already have done it.

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smhinsey
This is something I've been mulling over for our site (one of the big US
newsmags) which gets a lot of comments but has very limited community. One of
the approaches I've decided to explore a little further is tying your karma to
the votes on other articles, outside of a certain threshold. I'd like to use
the threshold to prevent people from getting "bombed" if they upset the wrong
person. The general hypothesis is that there is a relationship between the
quality of your contribution and your support of quality contributions from
others. the general implementation idea is that when you vote, it impacts your
karma. For example, if you upvote an unhelpful but witty comment and others
come and vote it down, you'd lose karma. If you voted up a comment that others
also voted up, you'd gain karma. There are a lot of ways to game such a
system, so you'd need to be really careful about the side-effects of this (it
should probably only account for a small portion of your karma, for example)
but I think it has promise nonetheless. I like to think of it sort of as Page
Rank for comment karma.

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pg
The problem with this kind of approach is that you reward people whose
opinions are closest to the average. Those are not the smart people.

~~~
smhinsey
You could end up biasing your community towards the mundane (the digg/fark
model) if you aren't careful, but what I'm thinking about is something that
instead of rewarding people who are "good voters" (for lack of a better term)
instead seeks to reward those community members who consistently support high
quality contributions.

I define "karma" as a means of valuing your contributions to the community,
and it seems that this ought not be dominated simply by what you contribute in
a literal sense, but also in what you contribute by encouraging others by
voting up their valuable contributions. If our definitions differ, I can see
that being the cause of the disagreement.

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earle
The HN userbase is extremely unique in the richness of experience of its
users. There are many successful people here in a wide range of areas on all
things Internet.

Identifying the value from the nonsense however may take a bit of effort for
some people. I do believe that this is still an excellent resource for viable
opinions.

