

Ask HN: How much are you paying for your karma? - RWilson

To dismiss any ideas that karma could be purchased or that anybody does:  that's not what I meant, read on.<p>I got thinking about this after reading a comment on another post about time = money, and wondered how much time karma leaders have spent on news.yc.  Effectually, how much have they paid for their karma.<p>And, no, this is not high-karma bashing.<p>Consuming news.yc can be a quick way to find interesting things.  Contributing to news.yc, though, is much more time intensive, especially if the content you wish to contribute is worthwhile.  Pointless comments can be published in seconds.  Thoughtful comments are, well, more time consuming as the commenter took the time to be thoughtful.<p>Which leads me to two graphs I wish I had:<p>(1) karma vs. time-on-site
(2) comment rating vs. time to write the comment.<p>It might also be interesting to include length of comment, since concise, witty comments are an exception that can be written quickly and rated highly.<p>But, since I don't have those graphs, I figured I'd just ask.  How much have you paid for your karma?  A monetary value depends on how much you think your time is worth, so rather than debate whose time is worth more, we can look at it in terms of karma per hour.<p>Now that would be an interesting leaderboard, best-of-news.yc ordered by karma / minute spent on news.yc ...
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paulgb
_I got thinking about this after reading a comment on another post about time
= money, and wondered how much time karma leaders have spent on news.yc.
Effectually, how much have they paid for their karma._

You're assuming that the only thing people get out of HN is karma, which is
certainly not the case. Karma is a side-effect.

~~~
RWilson
While I wasn't assuming that, good catch that I neglected to mention
otherwise. That said, we don't have a measure of the positive externalities to
ones life, whereas we do have karma.

So, fully recognizing that there is more to HN than earning karma, I'm still
intrigued by what these graphs might look like.

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rms
I use this site a whole lot if you measure it by page view, but when I was
running Rescue Time, it showed I spent about an hour a day actually on the
site. Residual browsing takes up more time than that but it beats watching tv.

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cmars232
Let's make it tangible. I'll upvote comments for $0.005, and posts for $0.01.

