Ask HN: I have been on hn for 10 years, how do you get more karma? - epynonymous
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yesenadam
Well, you could try using capital letters - I find your slabs of words without
capitals very hard to read. I'm a big disliker of caps too; in online chat I
often go without, but not on HN.

Also, make people feel glad they've read what you wrote; teach us something.
Give us a new perspective, ennoble our spirits, enrich our minds, be graceful
and patient; show us inspiring virtue, remarkable knowledge, well-described
experience. Either that or write a bot to submit news articles.

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gitgud
The points are a pretty accurate metric of how much someone _contributes_ to
the community. And a contribution is simply a new perspective or piece of
information to add. Some specific ways to contribute are:

\- Ask questions about submissions

\- Assess the merit of a submission

\- Describe something related that others might not know.

\- Link to related and supporting evidence.

Finally, be kind and humble.... and the karma will come

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tedmiston
Post contrarian opinions but succinctly and with room for people to correct /
refine your points ("strong opinions, weakly held"). My experience is that
wishy-washy comments don't go far here but opinionated ones do, even if
they're wrong.

Don't be afraid to post the first comment on a submission on the new page with
the hope of kickstarting the discussion.

That said, I don't know that HN karma matters for much in the real world.

As far as time zones, anecdotally HN seems to be most active during the
workday on west coast time.

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epynonymous
agree with most of your points. i also dont think karma matters much, but i
always wanted a green username. and also, how did you get 5777 karma points? i
was looking at your submissions, it’s almost like mine, 2-3 points on average.
this is somewhat like an seo challenge, i’m assuming your comments of someone
else’s article received lots of karma.

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tedmiston
Yes, my karma is almost exclusively (≥ 99%) from comments vs submissions.

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apacheCamel
I think it can really be summarized as the following: adding something to the
community. It can be a new relevant story/project submission or a comment with
an on-topic question/anecdote. As long as it adds something new and
different,(I say different here because it can't just be a re-iteration of
someone else's post, within reason) users will find it karma-worthy. Users
here being users like me and probably your average user on HN.

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epynonymous
thanks all, i should probably respond to each thread during the day to keep
the conversation lively, but was too busy with work, i just got off work now
and am doing a general thanks to all the responders. i thought i wrote some
pretty good articles on building a raspberry pi scoreboard, it went over some
design decisions and tradeoffs, and i also responded to some posts with, what
i thought was well thought up. maybe i’m in the wrong timezone (shanghai), i
think a forum is active during certain times and once that window’s past,
nobody’s really looking at all the stale comments.

also, i think in general, article submissions get buried quickly, ask HN, show
HN, url submissions, so you kind of either need to hit the right timing where
your article is right on top of the stack and everyone happens to be looking
at it or you have some mechanism to gain points by gaming the system with fake
accounts that add karma, to me that’s not worth the trouble. obviously the
content needs to be interesting, but i feel behind the curve here.

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yesenadam
Why do you care how many internet points you have?

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Kagerjay
Post better stuff

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mariust
Here you go, one karma point for you sir for this post.;)

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sgillen
Also be careful, if you add something that contributes nothing you may receive
downvotes.

