
How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2012/12/how-i-ended-up-with-so-much-hacker-news.html
======
citricsquid
The thing I like most about (commenting on) HN is that it's incredibly easy to
predict if a comment will get karma or not. HN is slow enough and the comment
listing algorithm works in such a way that if you post during the first half
of a submissions life your comment is guaranteed exposure and if the comment
has value it'll float to the top.

I don't think I've ever posted a comment and felt that the score (or
attention) didn't fairly reflect the value of the comment[1]. Something about
the uniformity is very reassuring, unlike reddit where you need to either be
in the first 5% of comments _or_ provide something seriously exceptional that
appeals to every reader to even have a chance of being listed near the top of
a submission.

From my experience the "best" scoring comments are easy to pinpoint why
they've scored well and if someone was so inclined they could very easily
spend their day "farming" karma here, but if someone were to do so they'd be
benefiting the site because the only real way to obtain karma here is to
provide value. Even if that value is trivial (like mentioning a relevant
article, or giving a brief anecdote that validates a point) it's still value.

[1] Sometimes controversial topics result in "unfair" scores, but they're also
very easy to expect before hand and generally if you post something
controversial you'll get good enough discussion from other users that it's
never a question of "I wish I knew why people gave me that score!" which is
the most frustrating thing.

~~~
diminish
It is not only the algorithm which works so. Our brains also in a similar
fashion; we first try to find out whether someone else's comment resonates
with our impressions or fragments of what remains in our minds after reading
the story.

So I upvoted you because you wrote first. You have to first mover's advantage.
And I believe it is fair.

~~~
brudgers
The first mover advantage goes beyond increased exposure. It means that one
has maximumized their ability to shape the direction of the conversation in
alignment with their thoughts. Because early comments are more likely to draw
responses, the top poster in a thread has the most opportunity to clarify and
extend their thoughts in follow-up responses.

Follow-up responses will tend to be received in the same vein as the initial
post, and if the initial post gained traction the one's follow-up is likely to
garner upvotes as well.

------
tokenadult
One other issue that I've noticed after looking at the leader board

<http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

here on Hacker News from time to time is that pg's last major change in the
site code (to make comment karma scores invisible to persons other than the
person posting the comment) really seems to have made a positive difference in
the site. That change was quite controversial when it was made.

Site founder pg began the experiment by opening a thread, "Ask HN: How to
stave off decline of HN?"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

After looking at the discussion there, he announced an experiment

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333>

601 days ago of not publicly showing comment karma scores, but rather just
letting each user see her or his own comment karma scores when logged in. That
change was protested in several LONG threads in the first few months after the
change, but what I noticed is that I started seeing the comments of the users
from whom I learned the most, the most often, more consistently sorting to the
top of threads, and on the leader board I noticed that the AVERAGE comment
scores (still disclosed there) of the 100 highest-karma users began better
matching who was making substantive, helpful comments as contrasted with who
was making comments that were, in pg's words, "a) mean and/or (b) dumb that
(c) get massively upvoted."

A reality check on what kind of comments get upvoted is to look from time to
time at the bestcomments list,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

which is still not exactly really a "best of" list of HN comments, but which
has converged to better quality since that software change. The user jgrahamc
appears to have seen his average comment karma score rise under the new
software settings, deservedly so. Other users whose comments are especially
thoughtful, whose user profile pages I visit to look up their most recent
comments, also appear to have gained in average karma over the last year and a
half that that software change has been in effect.

~~~
robbiea
good point. Now that you mention it, I actually forgot that there used to be
"points". I was adamantly against it before, but now I'm used to it. I kind of
enjoy it.

------
Xcelerate
It would be interesting to create a separate account just to see how high I
could get my "avg" metric. I think I have a general idea of what causes posts
to get upvoted. But that's not my goal when I write comments.

My best posts (on QM or molecular dynamics or color theory) don't get that
many points but I still write them because I feel like they are informative
and somebody could get a lot of use out of them. I occasionally also write
semi-controversial posts that I know won't get many upvotes, but I still feel
the arguments I make can be useful to others or hopefully at least spur
thought.

On the other hand, submissions remain a mystery to me. My highest voted
submission (466 points on old Russian photographs) nearly slid off the new
page before being caught right at the end with a surge of upvotes. However, my
submission on Titan (now the world's fastest supercomputer) got no interest
whatsoever, which really surprised me given the demographics of this place.

------
stephengillie
_But it looks like I've got better at writing comments people vote up. Or
perhaps the community has just grown and the number of upvotes has gone up for
a well received comment._

Or people have noticed that you tend to write comments that are either well-
designed, or that others widely agree with -- and because you've developed
that brand, some people now upvote you because they recognize your name
instead of anything to do with your posts.

Basically, people get used to seeing your name as one of the top comments, and
upvote you more often, even if they believe your comment to be equal to
others.

~~~
polshaw
I agree, i would be very interested to see the effect of hiding usernames (an
ID that lasted only for the thread), I bet it would distribute points
significantly differently.

There is also the timing aspect however; habitual commenter are more likely to
be in early to a thread.

~~~
stephengillie
And it's much easier to get upvotes when you're one of the first posters in a
comments thread -- others are more likely to upvote you instead of writing
their own comment.

If you see upvotes (U) as a product of the number of people viewing HN at a
specific point in time (V) and the percentage of people who will upvote the
post (Q) multiplied by the number of points in time (T) during which the post
is viewable, we find U=VQT.

We can increase U by posting when V is highest, by posting comments when the
most people are visiting HN. We can increase U by increasing the % of people
who like the post, which usually means writing a high-quality comment. We can
increase U by increasing T, the amount of time the post is available, simply
by posting it earlier.

~~~
brudgers
It's also easier to get downvotes as the first poster.

Thus comment quality is still the long term determinate. Particularly, now
that snark and meanness are less acceptable, more thoughtful comments are
required.

------
polyfractal
If you write quality comments, karma begets more karma because you'll sort
higher on the page. For example, Patio11 usually writes helpful posts, and
because of his obscene karma, he sorts automatically to the top of the page.
Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.

But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore. At least,
I've pretty much stopped looking at my karma score.

~~~
mhurron
> But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore.

Why did you care in the first place?

~~~
spindritf
With very few points you don't have certain privileges on the site
(downvoting, reporting) and you can get hellbanned for an unpopular comment.

------
petercooper
I'm behind jgrahamc at #29 but my results would be similar. One extra driver,
though, was getting on <http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders> was a goal a few
years ago. I specifically spent more time on the site and began to submit
stuff. Nothing low quality or spammy but just 'putting the time in.'

Now /leaders isn't highlighted anymore, I spend less time contributing and
more time lurking. This is neither good nor bad as I am statistically
insignificant in the great tide of stuff on here. But we're all motivated in
different ways in different contexts and I've learned over the years a main
motivator for me is credit/recognition/"glory" (and not the points _per se_ ).
Now I know that's a 'quirk' of mine, I take advantage of it as a way of
getting my work done and stopping procrastination, rather than trying to do
well on HN or wherever ;-) Except for this comment, surely..

------
philhippus
I drifted over to HN from reddit (and pre-meltdown digg before that). While I
had previously considered reddit comments to be 'higher brow' than those at
digg, I have found the gap to HN to be substantially wider. Not so much in
terms of grammar nazism and semantic pedantry, but more so tone, content and
comment structure.

Glib and offhand attempts at humour are not much appreciated here, even though
they might contain some wit, which reddit would gobble up.

The HN audience seems to upvote comments that are analytical, insightful and
informative. This takes some adjustment for reddit heroes who can reap great
karma with a well-placed meme.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
It's all about getting rid of the noise.

Because there's nothing worse than seeing 7,000 comments on a Reddit article
and 99.7% of them being complete garbage. That's discouraging to a community.
Why even bother posting when someone's lame joke is 347 votes ahead of yours.
So I'm a complete asshole on HN. When I see jokes or one liners I downvote
away. I feel guilty and sympathize for the poster but... I like the noise free
environment too much. So I wipe away the tears and downvote away.

------
jccc
These comments of mine were valued by HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4631280>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431975>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4754809>

These comments were punished by HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4789162>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515735>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515784>

I would like to find an online community that welcomes and values the latter
kind of participation.

~~~
mseebach
For the downvoted (not "punished") comments:

1 (FizzBuzz): You're responding to a strawman ("unrealistic audition
programming for a live audience") and dismissing, rather than responding to
the very point the article makes at great length ("Perhaps the hiring pool
really is that bad"). I wouldn't have voted it down, but it's honestly not
much of a value-add.

2 (Craigslist middleman): Again, I wouldn't have downvoted, but you're being
assertive for one side in the debate without backing your assertion by
reasoning or arguments. Also, it might just be me, but I catch a whiff of
aggression in your comment.

3 (same thread): You're aggressive and you're asserting that some nefarious
secrecy is going on, when no-one else has claimed that.

Granted, in both of 2 and 3, there's a likelihood of you being voted down
because it's a story about an entrepreneurial guy doing well, and you
disagreeing with the legitimacy of what he's doing. This is a very
entrepreneurial forum, so there's a bias against that.

~~~
brudgers
_"downvoted (not "punished")"_

Downvotes which one feels are unwarranted are best considered editorial
feedback. Take them as evidence that your writing did not match the
expectations of the audience which received it. This may be due to
misassumptions about the nature of the audience, or due to a miscommunication
of the point one is trying to make. The solution to downvotes one feels are
unwarranted is improving one's writing.

~~~
jccc
I apologize -- I meant "punished" somewhat poetically. I meant only to convey
that HN had shunned my comments with downvotes, fading those comments into the
background of the page.

The point is that I am questioning what those expectations of the audience
are. If you have read those threads, preferably in context, would you mind
giving me your own personal judgement about whether or not my voice in those
discussions is unwelcome or should be removed from the room? Particularly when
set aside those comments of mine that were deemed to be welcome?

~~~
brudgers
I'm not saying punishment doesn't happen. But the relevant questions are:

    
    
      How could your posts have been better written?
    
      Was their content thoughtful enough to be worth
      submitting in the first place (or not deleting
      after having been posted)?
    

As I said, take the votes as editorial feedback, and karma as a reflection of
the quality of the writing not the author.

Before posting the grandparent, I gave the links a cursory review. It was
pretty clear that there was nothing outstandingly insightful about the
comments. There was a bit of meanness, however. Their tone was a bit
argumentative without being informative, as well.

All one can do is support their writing with effort and bounce back from
mistakes and rejection as an author.

[Edit] I will add that comments do get systematically downvoted in a thread
when someone disagrees. This morning, all my comments in this thread were
downvoted by one, in a very short period of time. It is not unsurprising given
what I compared and the entity I criticized. If I was certain I had never done
the same thing, I might complain about it.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864977> But I think I might have had a
bad day, myself.

------
PaulHoule
To be a contrarian I'll say that jgc's blog is representative of the "new
journalism" that puts pageviews uber alles. In particular, I think jgc is more
interested in exploting the hacker news community for traffic than in good
writing.

It's true that jgc writes a lot, but I'd say his average article is pretty
average. His best articles are great, but it seems somehow he manages to score
a run for a blog post that's really worth a ball or a single. It's hard not to
believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.

~~~
jgrahamc
> It's hard not to believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.

Take that back. It's not true: I have no voting ring for my posts.

And here's some data to back that up. According to the HN Search API I have
submitted 373 items that are posts on jgc.org (out of a total of 670). Of
those the following karma has been gained:

    
    
      Points Number of posts
    
      1	 81
      <5	 102
      <10	 32
      <50	 74
      <100	 47
      <200	 6
      <500	 31
    

So, 215 posts out of 373 had less than 10 karma. Only 37 posts out of 373 had
> 100\. So, as you say, some of my posts (about 10%) are greatly appreciated
here, but most are not. No voting ring needed.

All those posts account for 12,624 points of karma (from my total of 18,119
points obtained from submissions, not comments). So 56% of my submissions were
for my blog and resulted in 70% of my submission karma.

------
benologist
I think this shows a real problem with karma - submissions are worth shitloads
more than comments. There are already multiple people on the leaders list for
nothing more than spewing out generic tech sites.

------
rachelbythebay
If you want to see how much is linked to content quality and how much comes
from having a well-known account, perhaps it is time to open another. Posting
high-quality stuff from another account should yield the same results if that
is the only signal used when people up vote things.

------
psycho
Getting karma by post describing how you got karma? Nice move... (guess, I
won't get much karma for this comment)

And in fact as I can see there's no much use in HN karma - smart comments are
more useful. At least, they can do you good when you apply to YC (that's what
PG says at least :)).

~~~
gknoy
I voted the article up not because of its subject matter, but rather for the
thorough way in which he analyzed and presented it. It was a notable amount of
effort to collect the data, and it takes some skill to put it together in a
way which one can derive meaning from.

He then proceeds to do exactly that, and give us all a good tactic for
increasing our karma: Post Consistently Interesting Stuff over a Long Time.
Sure, we all read that and think, "_duh_, of course that's how to get it", but
it's nice to see that there's data backing it.

~~~
psycho
Well, I understand that hackers are a bit like scientists - they like to have
proved data (by the way, I'm more like a humanitarian who believes his
feelings and intuition).

And I understand your reasons and they're quite good. I don't think that it's
a bad article to vote up - moreover I like the article too. There's some "pure
math" magic in it that I also like (although I'm a humanitarian as I've
mentioned before).

------
hdivider
I'm willing to bet that short attention spans play a significant role in
making karma less meaningful - in the sense that it can penalise more
extensive and thorough comments in favour of short, snappy one- or two-liners.

Take the following scenario: you've got some interesting topic that most HN
users will click on, and the #1 comment is like this:

\--------- parent comment line 1

\--------- parent comment line 2

\--------- parent comment line 3

...

\--------- parent comment line x

>>>>\--------- reply comment line 1

>>>>\--------- reply comment line 2

If you're in that jittery state of mind when you just want some infotainment
without reading dozens of lines of dense and subtle text, isn't it more likely
that you'll just read the _reply_ to that top comment first, since it's short
and snappy? It may even make you feel that you've made progress towards
understanding what the parent comment was about, without actually spending the
required amount of time on it. Topics on HN obviously have a strong bias
towards solid intellectual content (and I don't necessarily mean academic
topics), so it's probably unlikely that much insight can be gained from very
short comments - unless the poster is particularly observant and skilled in
condensing information, of course.

That's just one of the reasons why I'm sceptical about karma. I think it does
serve a purpose, but if the majority of users go into a topic with no real
intention to read or comprehend anything thoroughly, karma becomes a less
meaningful measure of contribution.

~~~
Sodaware
Reddit suffers heavily from short attention spans, mostly in the popular
subreddits (/r/pics, /r/funny etc). There are still some long comments that
rise to the top, but most of the time it's a joke or reference. Much like the
content.

------
guelo
A better HN submission would have been a JavaScript site that generates all
those graphs for other HN users.

------
omnisci
So do you get an award for having high Karma?

I think people put too much weight on things like this. I've been on message
boards for over 12 years. People know me because of my name and what I
contribute, my karma (which we don't have) or likes or friends don't matter.

~~~
dsr_
There are a couple of awards. One is the ability to downvote as well as
upvote. That comes pretty early. The second is the ability to change the color
of the stripe at the top of the page (for your own, logged-in views).

~~~
omnisci
Well, now that you put it like that, I'm going to collect karma (actually the
downvote thing is helpful) like a mofo! :)

------
cyphersanctus
Have you found a reason for the difference in the average karma that you
calculated and the one on your actual profile?

~~~
jgrahamc
The HN code removes outliers.

    
    
      (def update-avg (user)
        (= (uvar user avg) (comment-score user))
        (save-prof user))
    
      ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
      ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.
    
      (def comment-score (user)
        (aif (check (nthcdr 5 (comments user 50)) [len> _ 10])
             (avg (cdr (sort > (map !score (rem !deleted it)))))
             nil))

~~~
gjm11
More than that. [EDIT: When I wrote this, jgrahamc's comment said only "IIRC
the HN algorithm removes outliers". Since then he's added much more. But I
don't believe in deleting comments merely because edits to their parents have
made them less valuable.] The "average" in the HN profile is something along
the following lines: take the 6th to 25th most recent comments, throw away the
one with most points, and take the average of the others. So it ignores old
comments, it ignores very recent comments, and it ignores some kinds of
outlier. Oh, and it's only actually recalculated every few days.

Personally I don't much like this: average karma is a fairly good proxy for
what I want to be optimizing in my HN participation, but the way HN reports it
more or less pessimizes it as a feedback tool for me. (I'm a fairly infrequent
and "bursty" commenter; HN's reporting of average karma isn't up-to-date
enough to tell me what HN thinks of what I've been doing recently, nor is it
long-term enough to tell me what HN thinks of me overall.)

The right answer, of course, is not to care much about karma. This is made
easier by the fact that the correlation between HN karma and my own judgement
of comment quality is weak, and I'm arrogant enough to think the latter is
more accurate.

------
DannyBee
I hope the karma->US dollars conversion rates stay high so that someday I can
use my karma to put a down payment on a house.

------
taylorbuley
Regarding average karma per post, I happily tote a ~2.5 while still hitting a
spot the leaderboard. I could drive up my average number by picking stuff I
could be certain the community wanted to see, but I purposefully submit things
that I think are contrarian or otherwise overlooked. I think pushing our
collective comfort zone is worth it.

------
jcfrei
maybe another factor to consider (and don't take this as a critique) might be
your user name. I doubt few people _actually_ confuse you with pg. nonetheless
I believe it's a name that sticks out given the prominence of the name graham
on this board - and as a result your user name might be easier to remember.

------
cpeterso
Posting a popular article link can earn hundreds of karma points without much
effort, whereas you would have to spend a lot of time writing many insightful
comments to get the same karma. Comments also carry the risk of downvotes.

------
jiggy2011
I've been curious (I don't advocate trying this) as to how possible it would
be to create an account for the explicit purpose of farming karma (for the
minimum amount of effort) and what strategy would be best to achieve this.

~~~
nsns
Submitting random articles from favorite sites (TechCrunch, Ars Technica,
TorrentFreak, etc.) _as soon as they're published_ (i.e. before anyone else),
would probably get you a few thousand Karma points in a month or two.

From my point of view however, getting good points on a comment is a lot more
satisfying and worthwhile than your general Karma count (once you're over the
various thresholds).

------
intelliot
I like the Hacker News karma system. Is there anything else like it?

------
digitalengineer
TL;DR content (of comments and most of all stories) is king.

~~~
sesqu
It's actually the prince. The once and forever king is timing.

If you get pithy, insightful, argued, or just convenient comment in on a top
story before it becomes a top story, you'll see an order of magnitude more
points rolling your way than if you contribute research or elucidation in a
day-old thread. A similar situation happens with submissions - you need
reasonable content, but it can die with 1 point if the timing or title don't
hit the sweet spot.

Content functions only as a high-pass filter.

~~~
digitalengineer
Good explanation! Timing -as always- is boss.

------
James_Henry2
Woah - I didn't even know a leaderboard existed!

------
wonjun
Great post, I need to increase my current karma, 68, avg 1.6

~~~
rpm4321
Well, this post won't help ;)

In all seriousness, I really wouldn't worry about it at all.

If you're not just being yourself, asking questions with candor when they come
up, and chipping in with answers when you can, you're going to miss the point
of HN.

~~~
techdmn
I agree, but I also think it's a tricky subject. Doing things for the sole
purpose of increasing your karma would probably be considered a negative
behavior. On the other hand the community gives karma to reward behavior it
approves of (and vice versa), so it isn't right to completely ignore it
either.

~~~
wonjun
I would say my contribution so far hasn't been too popular, so I'm going to
look for more popular items.

------
nu2ycombinator
What is avg? And howz it calculated?

