

The leader board now shows average karma. - jacquesm

But there is one potential drawback, answering 'Ask HN' style posts is a fantastic way to destroy your average, this may lead to people answering those less because they might be afraid of denting their 'average' karma.
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saurabh
Not just Ask HN questions but people will think thrice before commenting on
anything and everything. The quality of comments on HN is pretty good as it
is. I think this is a bad idea. Sometimes not showing something can be a good
thing.

~~~
pplante
I agree revert back!

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mechanical_fish
Hm, we're up to Karma Average. Soon we will be tracking Karma Assists and
Total Karma Created.

But it is only when Nate Silver unveils PEKOTA that we will finally know the
ONE TRUE SCALE on which greatness is measured. [1]

\--

[1] _Poster Empirical Karma and Optimization Test Algorithm_

~~~
tptacek
Total karma created would be a really good metric.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Come to think of it, it might.

I presume "total karma created" is all of your karma, plus all of the karma
accumulated by _other comments_ that are in response to your comments and
submissions?

Wait, don't tell me... searchyc already has a page for this, right?

I'd also love to see that stat broken down by link destination instead of by
submitter. My money is on Techcrunch, though 37signals might do well in the
PACK rankings. [1]

\---

[1] Per-post Average Creation of Karma

~~~
jacquesm
What's a karma assist ?

~~~
mechanical_fish
This must be how Douglas Adams felt when people would come up to him and ask
why he'd chosen "forty-two".

Okay, let me see what I can do with this one. You score one _karma assist_
when a given user upvotes your comment immediately before or after upvoting a
comment higher up on the same branch. The idea is that you can help other
comments rise in prominence by adding your comment to them, thereby increasing
their value. Thus, if someone upvotes your comment above and upvotes this
comment at the same time, I get a Karma Assist.

Naturally, you can't Assist your own comment, because everyone knows that's a
sin.

But I worry that this definition still isn't arbitrary enough. You actually
might be able to compute this with an algorithm, which ruins the humor value.
If the jokey analogy to NBA assists is going to hold up, Karma Assists need to
be both poorly defined _and_ arbitrated by bored human minions with a serious
conflict of interest:

[http://deadspin.com/5345287/the-confessions-of-an-nba-
scorek...](http://deadspin.com/5345287/the-confessions-of-an-nba-scorekeeper)

~~~
jacquesm
42 was obvious ;)

------
Alex3917
When I look up the averages of my favorite posters, some are near two and
others are near ten. I don't really see a pattern here, but maybe others have
figured out a productive way to use this information?

------
pg
It's the average comment score. It doesn't include submissions.

~~~
wheels
It seems something might be buggy. Mine has been going down since new feature
was posted (as I recall it was 5.71 a couple days ago, now 5.35) though my
average is well above that during that time.

~~~
pg
It looks at the last n comments, so when a high scoring comment passes outside
that window, your average will go down.

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tptacek
This only matters if you care what your average karma over some arbitrary
number of previous posts is. Every once in awhile when I go on a long run of
posts with low/negative karma, I'll check searchyc.com --- which doesn't have
the same limitations as news.yc. You can safely ignore the HN leaderboard.

------
shaddi
It'd be cool if you could sort by average karma. You'd obviously need some way
to compensate for users with only a handful of comments that happened to be
highly voted up, but this would still be nice to see.

~~~
kirubakaran
<http://top.searchyc.com/>

------
allenbrunson
i'm not seeing how answering 'ask hn' posts would have any particular effect
on your karma. if you have a good answer, it will get voted up, same as
normal. is there something i'm missing?

~~~
jacquesm
Ask HN posts scroll off the page usually with just the one answer and 0
upvotes. If the answer is 'to the point' then it's dealt with, so it needs no
further votes.

------
pclark
my heart missed a beat as I checked to make sure I was still on it.

