

Ask HN: Why is Karma so unfair on HackerNews? - justinzollars

I&#x27;ve been a HN member for a few months and I notice Karma is not very fair. For example the &quot;Google was down&quot; Story earned the HN member d1egoaz many Karma points with over 791 upvotes and 405 comments. Karma seems like a luck function more than actual Karma. Why is Karma so unfair on HN?
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benologist
Submission karma is utterly worthless. All it means is you submit tons of
shit, by hand or by bot. In the last year or two there's been a handful of
accounts that made the Leaders list [0] by auto or mass submitting generic
tech sites (techcrunch, ars, wired etc... really "safe" stuff), even a couple
of company spammers were on it at one point! There's no way to win that
contest, but more importantly it's not a measure of anything valuable.

Comment karma is worth paying attention to because it doesn't hinge on being
the first to submit whatever AOL just shat out.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

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catinsocks
Well submission and comment karma are the same karma on HN so it's hard to
tell them apart the only other factor you can look at that might be reasonable
or a popularity contest is the average as I believe that only pertains to
comment karma.

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benologist
Yeah that's something I wish they would separate out, on top of the combined
score the average itself is not calculated in real time and discards outliers
and I think only looks at your recent comments so it's not even a perfect
measure, just a better one than submission karma.

I would like to see karma more focused on contribution - comments of course,
but also finding quality stories that aren't on mainstream sites.

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hobs
Just like normal karma, the only person you are competing with is yourself. I
enjoy it when I write a comment that others either appreciate or agree with
and think is the "correct" sentiment, and find that downvotes are sometimes
interesting as well as I find that I may be in the minority on a viewpoint.

The only thing I find sometimes irritating is that sometimes when I am flip I
get more upvotes than when I am being serious, but maybe it's just HN telling
me to speak my mind more.

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tokenadult
How I deal with this is by remembering that life seems like a luck function
more than actual Karma. If I want to do good, I do that just because it is the
right thing to do. Whether I am rewarded for that or not, I can decide to keep
on doing good.

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EpicEng
Define "fair". People upvote a thread/comment when it is something they are
interested in or agree with. What's "unfair" about that? It's a measure of
popularity, not inherent worthiness.

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alecsmart1
What's unfair about it? He was able to report it first and thus got karma for
it. Although I agree that comments should have more weight than posting links.
But I think it's a chicken and egg story.

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NAFV_P
> _But I think it 's a chicken and egg story._

Boot karma.

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wmf
Karma hardly matters, so I guess it doesn't matter if it's unfair.

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RougeFemme
It's not as bad as you think. The submitting member only gets the submission
upvotes. The comment upvotes go the individual commenters. So d1egoaz only got
791 points.

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throwaway420
I think most communities that rely on a points system need it to be a little
"unfair" as incentive for taking the time and effort to find and post fresh
content.

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brudgers
Speaking of fairness, "Google [is/]was down" is/was about 500 times more
interesting to hackers than this thread.

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sp332
There are only 42 people on this site with more karma than me. I think the
karma system is fine and you should stop complaining.

;)

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interstitial
It's just fake internet points. "Unfair" presumes there is some sort of intent
to engineer fairness at HN when it appears they are just trying ton engineer
tailored content. It's best to find a start-up or side project to work on
instead of worrying about internet points. But HN is a great place for
procrastinating coders.

