
Ask HN: Why didn't I get my karma points? - relaunched
My last submission was ~3 days ago. It has earned 5 points and I&#x27;m wondering my karma hasn&#x27;t moved yet.<p>Why is there lag? How does the logic work? Is it lag or do you not earn points, sometimes? It&#x27;s unclear, but it could be a downvote scenario - but I didn&#x27;t see my karma points go up or down as points for the article changes.<p>There is a &#x27;roughly&#x27; in the guidelines. What does that mean?<p>ref - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsfaq.html
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ColinWright
Non-official answer:

Not all upvotes are considered equal. There is logic in the system to prevent
voting rings. If people are suspected of having a groups of friends and they
all upvote each others' submissions indiscriminately, then the votes aren't
counted against the people, but are still counted for the article.

There's more to it, and I don't know all the details, but in short, you don't
always get votes credited to you, hence the "roughly" in the FAQ.

You can email the mods and ask for more details, but the algorithms are not
completely open, not least because they discourage really caring about karma.
It's rough and ready and good enough to help rank items and comments.

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gus_massa
I agree with the other two comments.

I think it doesn't look like a voting ring problem. (I don't have internal
information, It's only a gut feeling looking at the pattern of submissions of
the user, the site and the Moon phase.) I'd expect a 50% increase of points,
something like 2 or 3 in this case.

If you want an official reply, write to the mods hn@ycombinator.com

In the guidelines, 'roughly' means something like

fake quotes> _the difference is part of the secret sauce (for example to
prevent spam) and we tweak it constantly (so it 's difficult to explain)_

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simonblack
Karma is a meaningless number.

I've had zero extra karma from a well-written and thought-out post, and I've
had tens of extra karma points from what I considered a 'throw-away line'.

And what do I get from all that karma? Zero, zilch, nada, nuttin'.

Don't waste your time chasing it. Or if you do, don't complain about it.

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jacquesm
That's not how it works. Karma is not a direct addition OR subtraction based
on up and downvotes. Also, if your five points are due to a voting ring or
similar pattern they might not be counted at all.

