

How KArma should be measured - Atremis

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How Karma Should Be Measured
Measuring karma was a heavily-debated topic for a while on HackerNews. The goal is to provide some measurement that both accurately measures overall contribution to the community and encourages consistent engagement. Several solutions were discussed and a few were even tried. For example, pg tried to replace the overall karma score with an average score. All three combinations (total only, average only, and both) were juggled around in the top right corner, until eventually the simple total was used.&lt;p&gt;While all these attempts were good ideas, I think there is an even better metric that should be used here: the Sharpe ratio.&lt;p&gt;Risk adjusted returns
When you look to invest in an asset, it&#x27;s often important to consider the risk of an investment as well as the overall historical returns. Assuming you have no external knowledge of the asset, looking at the volatility of its returns is a pretty good estimate of risk. Ideally, you&#x27;d like to see super high returns with no volatility– just a steady stream of money rolling in day after day.1
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wslh
I don't if you are talking about the same risk issue or not: for example, I
submit a lot of links every day and 99% of them have 0 extra votes. This
decreases my karma but I think those links are interesting for the HN
community and I take the risk to post them.

It would be really difficult to quantify the risks: I am a bot or a human? are
these links really interesting?

