
Ask HN: Do posts by authors with more karma rank higher? - nick-garfield
As the title states.. Is the HN ranking algorithm based purely on a post&#x2F;comment&#x27;s upvotes and engagement, or is the author&#x27;s karma points an input into the algorithm as well?
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dang
No.

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tptacek
There's no documented karma input to ranking and I doubt any exists. Stories I
submit are picked up as randomly as anyone else's.

The same isn't true of stories I write; I have a pretty good track record of
getting blog posts on the front page. But HN doesn't know when something I've
submitted is something I've written; what gets stories from high-karma users
ranked is mostly just name recognition.

I doubt people are looking at the submitter name when choosing to upvote
stories; I do think some subset of them look at the domain name of the story
site though.

~~~
j1elo
I have _never_ checked out how much karma anyone has in here, but after
reading you I went on to have a look. First time I look at this, and it turns
out you have "331331". That was a strange enough number that for a split
second made me think I was looking at some random description field and you
had put some magic number you like ( _a la_ 1337 or the likes)

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jimbob45
[https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
undocumented](https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented)

This might help answer some of your burning questions.

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vl
Even this doesn’t stress how heavily HN is moderated. You can see it
occasionally when there is some news cycle and you look an HN and everything
is “Rust is cool. How we raised a round for a product we don’t have (yet).
Tips for thinking effectively while in the open office.” This basically tells
you that dang decided enough is enough and cleaned up the front page.

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majewsky
> when there is some news cycle and [the front page does not reflect it]

Political news is discouraged by the site guidelines and quickly flagged by
users without mods' intervention (source: I'm one of these users). If I want
the latest Trump nonsense, I can go to MSNBC or Fox News or Colbert or
whatever. I'd rather have more stuff on the front page which we can have a
(mostly) constructive conversation about.

~~~
reitanqild
Some of us actually want to discuss politics with sane, smart people so I
rarely flag thise stories (but I understand why you do.)

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wglb
I think this is a dicey area for discussion. Political discussions have
always, and particularly so today, essentially consisted of ripping off bits
of dogma and throwing at each other. While my family and I are generally on
the same page, I avoid political discussions with them as well.

I am often inclined to flag political threads here if they get egregiously
bad. It very often gets to be the opposite of interesting.

~~~
reitanqild
> Political discussions have always, and particularly so today, essentially
> consisted of ripping off bits of dogma and throwing at each other.

Despite that I have actually learned stuff here from people that I originally
disagreed deeply with.

(Oh, and I am also fairly sure certain people have/could learned/learn
something from me, but thats up to them to seize the opportunity. d:-)

> I am often inclined to flag political threads here if they get egregiously
> bad.

I wish they were better but often I wish people could stick to flagging bad
behavior instead of the entire thread.

That said, I am not here to challenge moderator decisions. Even with showdead
on this place is fantastic compared to certain places I find it easy to
compare with.

~~~
majewsky
> Despite that I have actually learned stuff here from people that I
> originally disagreed deeply with.

Agreed. The incidence rate of people who can intelligently argue a
controversial position is much higher here than in the average population.

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mindcrime
I have moderately high karma, and I haven't noticed any evidence that my posts
are treated favorably as a result. I'm less sure on comments. At times I have
suspected that comments from high karma users may get bubbled up, but I
certainly couldn't swear to it.

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manmal
I‘m also quite certain that, with more karma, comments stay at the top longer.
Cannot say much about submissions.

~~~
slg
I have seen anecdotal evidence of this too. I have noticed some of my comments
have not been upvoted and yet have stuck higher in the rankings than comments
that I know have received upvotes because I upvoted them myself. Although dang
has stated that account karma doesn't impact the ranking algorithm so who
knows. Either way, it seems obvious there is something more complex than a
simple formula based on upvotes and post age.

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jmondi
Fwiw, I saw this post on the front page, with no comments and you don't
particularly have THAT much karma. Whatever that means.

~~~
nick-garfield
Haha good point

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ChuckMcM
FWIW, I just commented on the Ask HN about career advice and my comment landed
about 2/3rds down the page. Seems like a data point for the "ranking of
comments does not look at karma" point of view.

~~~
sgt
With 90556 in karma you're pretty close to 100k! I guess you get to find out
whether HN sends you a Silver Upvote Button in the mail.

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weinzierl
I don't know if it is purely based on upvotes but what I can say for my
account is that on average I used to get significantly less then one karma
point per upvote. When I watched the upvote counter on the individual item[1]
and compared it with my karma increase a view years ago it was pretty
consistent at 0.5.

Back then I shrugged this of as effect of the voting ring detector but it left
me wondering: can the false positive rate be so high and so consistent ...
IDK. Needless to say that I never participated in a voting ring and I'm not
that well connected that many upvotes should be from the same people.

An alternative explanation that crossed my mind was if it could depend on the
story/comment ratio because back at the time I submitted much more stories
than I wrote comments. I did this with good intentions, I often like to read
what other think even if I don't get involved in the discussion, but I could
understand if a platform incentivized a healthy ratio of submissions and
discussion.

[1] I can't remember if this was true for stories or comment but I think I
could only see it for one type of submission.

~~~
dang
Not all upvotes count towards karma. This is related to HN's anti-abuse
systems. It would be nice if it could just be simple, but one-to-one mappings
turn out to be the most gameable things, so we've had to do fancy footwork
over the years.

~~~
weinzierl
Makes sense. Just to avoid the wrong impression, when I said I never
participated in a voting ring, what I really meant was that I never tried to
game the system im any way. Easy for me to say, I know, unfortunately
impossible to proof. Anyways, I was just curious about my story/comment ratio
theory, but I guess I will never know...

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awillen
Related question: do up/downvotes from users with more karma count more than
those from users with little karma?

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fsflover
No. You can create a new account, upvote someone and check how their karma
changes.

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AnonC
The latter would create a bubble of some people’s submissions flooding the
site over time and not allowing others’ submissions to come to the front page.

The ranking _is affected_ to a good extent by when a post is submitted because
of the times (and time zones) when more HN voters are online and active.

~~~
nick-garfield
Yeah this is really interesting. The "velocity" of upvotes/comments seems to
be more important than the actual raw count.

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oblib
I have had a few of my post make the front page and I don't have a lot of
karma and don't personally know anyone else who has a user account here.

I've also posted a link that got buried without anyone looking at it, then
came back later in the day to see someone else posted the same thing from a
different source and it made the front page.

If there are others gaming their posts here to get karma points they can have
them. As far as I know there's no place to cash them in so it doesn't cost me
anything.

It's nice to see others find what I've submitted interesting and "karma" gives
us a measure of that, but the reason I check into HN is to find things that
interest me.

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Priem19
I'm new here, but my limited experience so far has been good. I've only
submitted a handful of things, of which I initially thought "this deserves
much more up votes," but in retrospect I came about and acknowledged my bias
because I'm the author or it fits my worldview. I don't think all my posts
merit their current karma, but most do.

Also, somehow I find myself being disincentivized to post unhelpful comments.
As a matter of fact, every time I share an article I found on Hacker News I
recommend people reading the comments. This site definitely has the highest
helpful to unhelpful comment ratio.

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simcop2387
I suspect even if it's not done deliberately it happens as a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The people that have high amounts of karma tend to post better
articles so people are more likely to look at them or follow the person.

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Carpetsmoker
I've sometimes submitted some of my own content here, usually without much
happening. Then have someone else (not always with more karma) submit it again
1 to 24 hours later and it got to the front page. I've also had content do
fairly well on e.g. Reddit or Lobsters be pretty much ignored here as well.

I call it the HN roulette. I think HN is just too large and a lot of good
content (or at least, I'd like to think my own content is good, heh) gets
missed. Quality of the content is definitely a factor, as are things like an
enticing headline, but you also just need to be lucky.

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wglb
Things that I have seen that influence whether a story will end up being
ranked: 1) Timing. Early in the morning Eastern US time 2) The uniqueness of
the posting. When everyone is posting COVID or protest stories, a story about
an interesting astronomical event (e.g. PHA) is slightly more likely to get a
kick. 3) I suspect that there may be a tendency to browse /newest by some
folks and if they see submissions by posters they know, there may be a slight
liklihood of upvotes.

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kelvin0
Not 100% sure, but: \- Karma is indeed a good indicator. \- Having a
'non'-anonymous HN profile also seems to make your posts more credible.

Otherwise, good luck!

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simonblack
Karma is a meaningless number. It depends more on luck than good management.
I've put well-written posts out there with no karma given. I've also written
throw-away lines that gain oodles of karma. Go figure.

20 million karma points and five bucks will buy you a coffee.

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IvyMike
I always thought it would be neat to apply something like pagerank to reddit
(or HN, or whatever) comments. Surprised nobody has done this.

(Maybe it would turn into an echo chamber pretty fast, but I'm not 100%
certain, which is like I'd like to see someone try it.)

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oliwarner
Technically, I suspect there's a _very_ strong correlation. You get a lot of
karma for popular posts.

But never seen any evidence that the system gives you preferential treatment
if you have good karma.

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andybak
I've got a fairly decent karma score and everything I post sinks like a stone.
:)

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dheera
No, but the only way to get a post to the front page of HN these days is to
discreetly ask a bunch of your friends to upvote it. And people with high
karma are probably people who tend to have other friends who are also HN
readers and who they can ask for upvotes.

As much as this probably isn't the fair system we all want, it's what the
system's optimization encourages today.

Try posting something SUPER interesting, staying quiet and not telling anyone.
It's almost guaranteed not to make it to the front page.

Although I don't encourage this, with the current algorithm, you could
probably even _prevent_ others' from getting their work on the front page by
posting it ahead of time. When they try to post it they'll get a duplicate
link but it's already stale and past its upvote-to-front-page life, which is
probably about 30-60 minutes.

~~~
dang
Why do you say these things? I'd be fascinated to know.

Almost everything here is wrong. HN's anti-abuse software isn't perfect, but
if you ask friends to upvote your article, there's a high chance it won't help
and you'll get your (and their) accounts penalized in the process. We actually
go through the penalized posts looking for things to rescue because people
tank their own good work in this way so reliably.

The dupe detector does not work the way you described.

If you post something super interesting that doesn't get attention, you (or
anyone) can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we might put it in the
second-chance pool
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)),
in which case it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

~~~
dheera
Thanks! This is helpful to know.

I've seen lots of friends (including dozens of YC founders) ask for upvotes,
usually via FB in ways that wouldn't necessarily constitute a ring (e.g.
asking strangers in founder-friendly facebook groups), and they're usually of
things worthy of publicity, and they do make it to the front page pretty
quickly after the upvote requests.

I've also seen a lot of instances where posting once didn't do anything, and
then posting a second time with an equivalent but different URL + asking a few
friends to help upvote made it to the front page pretty quickly.

For example, I posted
[https://github.com/dheera/rosshow](https://github.com/dheera/rosshow) on
2019-Mar-27 -- no dice.

Then posted it again with a "www.", i.e.
[https://www.github.com/dheera/rosshow](https://www.github.com/dheera/rosshow)
\-- then asked a couple friends to upvote -- and then BAM front page
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19519165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19519165)).

So the only thing I did differently between trial A and B was asked people to
upvote, and trial B succeeded.

~~~
dang
Assuming I'm reading the data correctly, your friends' votes were rejected by
HN's software on that second submission. Randomness is the biggest factor on
/newest, which is why we allow a small number of reposts to begin with: to
give good submissions multiple cracks at the bat.

~~~
dheera
Thanks, helpful to know! I would have thought reposts would be penalized. Is
there anyway to potentially mitigate the randomness factor though? For example
by measuring things like impression time, bounce rate, and so on.

