

Hacker News Karma Superstars - shawndumas
http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars

======
hawkharris
I'm fascinated by the psychology behind online rating systems.

Honestly, they are big motivators for me. I get a burst of endorphins when I
receive many Facebook "likes" or upvotes on HackerNews. When I am ignored or
downvoted, I feel as if I've been voted out of a digital democracy.

What's interesting, though, is that many online rating systems aren't
democracies; they're dictatorships. In other words, it's unclear to the user
how the process of ranking / rating actually works. (HN is pretty transparent,
I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this regard.)

~~~
bluetidepro
> " _HN is pretty transparent, I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this
> regard._ "

Don't you mean vice-versa? Facebook is completely obvious, and HN is the one
that isn't at all. On Facebook I can easily see if I have 5 'Likes', which 5
people 'Liked' it. On HN, I have no idea why/who/where/etc the up-votes are
coming from, or how they are weighted in various ways based on who actually
up-voted you. It's the opposite of transparent. It's just a number with an up
and down arrow. With Facebook, there is obvious measures by seeing the number
of comments (and by who), the number of 'Likes' (and by who), and so forth.
Not sure I follow your logic on that, unless you just accidentally reversed
your sentence.

EDIT: I was thinking more in terms of "Upvotes/Likes". I see what OP might
mean now from the standpoint of Facebook logic on what content you actually
see, and that side of things.

~~~
cryptoz
HN is open source. Do you want to know how posts rise to the top? Go read the
code. Do you want to know how Facebook determines what content you see? You
could be a criminal, a felon, if you try to find out their algorithms (how do
you do that, hack their servers?).

I'm not the OP, but that might be the direction the original logic was going.

~~~
switz
HN is not open source. It may have been at one time, but that ship has long
sailed. We have no idea what code may have been changed, and how things are
weighted differently. Presumably, there's a reason Paul no longer wants it to
be open source.

~~~
cryptoz
Hm, interesting. I was referring to the old news.arc it seems, I didn't
realize times had changed. Thanks.

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swombat
tptacek is clearly a fake account! No one can post that much upvoted stuff for
such a long, sustained period. Someone ban him!

~~~
tptacek
I asked to get taken off the leaderboard! It's frankly embarrassing.
Obviously, my karma score doesn't mean anything anymore; it's a function of
name recognition, of the fact that I happen to post in a style (rambling
paragraphs) that HN rewards, of the fact that I comment a lot, of the fact
that I try to keep myself confined to topics where I have a lot of background
knowledge, and of the fact that people follow my comments.

There's nothing to learn about me at all from my karma score. From my comment
frequency, sure: you'd learn that I comment a lot. I don't IRC, I don't game,
and I no longer blog; I treat HN like I used to treat Usenet. Also, we hire
from HN, and so I have a Pavlovian thing going on with commenting.

Every once in awhile I consider switching to "tptacek_" or something, but
that's just giving the embarrassing karma score more power over my life.

I liked Slashdot's approach to this, which was (when I was there) that above a
threshold your score just became "Lots".

~~~
antonios
Upvoted. You won't get away that easily.

------
lettergram
Personally, I know I am not too interested in this. I have seen somewhere
upwards of 100 posts up voted on snowden to the front page, yet only about 5
with new content. Point being, although you can get a lot of up votes by
posting "hot" topics, I know for a fact there are interesting (many times more
interesting) posts that never make it near the top posts.

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sneak
These 50/day numbers are really disheartening.

I thought I was doing well with 10/day (recently, not lifetime), and I'm not
even on there.

~~~
josh2600
If you're counting imaginary points on the Internet you'll always be
disheartened.

HackerNews has never been about Karma for me. I'm here for educated
discussion. As soon as this site ceases to be the forefront of intelligent
technical discussion on the Internet, I'll bounce, but I care much more about
discussion than Karma, which is worth reiterating.

Karma has no value, but the strength of your arguments carry weight.

~~~
nealabq
>If you're counting imaginary points on the Internet you'll always be
disheartened.

Bitcoin is also imaginary points on the Internet. I hope I don't end up
disheartened.

~~~
josh2600
Bitcoin is a tad more fungible than HN Karma, but I appreciate the point.

I think you're being facetious, but I do appreciate the point.

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q_revert
what might also be interesting is to see _how_ karma is accrued.. from a huge
number of submissions, or from a large number of insightful comments, or what
the breakdown is..

for example, i've made two submissions, both making it to the #1 spot, and
have been afraid to submit any more lest my streak be ended

some measure of quality over quantity would be nice :)

~~~
minimaxir
Unfortunately, Comment Karma is not available publically. (Unless you tried to
do Total Karma - Karma from submitted Links)

Why doesn't HN distinguish between Link Karma and Comment Karma a la Reddit
anyways?

~~~
dfc
I am not very interested in karma, and part of the reason is that there is no
distinction between comment karma and submission karma. I don't think that
being the first to submit an interesting link should be comparable to being
the first person to submit an interesting comment. But that's because I come
here for the discussions. I imagine that people who come here for new links
and never browse the discussions feel differently.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is something that it would be interesting for these guys to separate out.
There are clearly a number of accounts which just submit everything from
various 'known to hit' blogs/sites, there are some that submit what ever was a
high scoring article a year ago, Etc etc.

What I find amusing is that since they are essentially playing a game "karma
scoring for fun" they complain about it when someone else's submission of the
same story gets more karma than they got.

That said the use of a mechanism like karma points to drive user engagement
and participation is pretty classic. You could ask someone to spend hours day
scouring the internet for interesting stories but they would want you to pay
them. Offer up karma points to the people who find the cool stories and
suddenly they are competing for free to populate the news feed for your site.

------
austinl
To compete with Lightning, it looks like you have to submit content 1-4 times
per day. Most submissions only get a few points.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Lightning](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Lightning)

------
tokenadult
Searching around with HN Search after seeing this thread reminded me of this
comment by tptacek about Wikipedia

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720)

which is very, very good.

P.S. I will always be behind one person who has the same join date I have,
namely patio11, in both daily karma accumulation over time and total
accumulated karma. And very deservedly so. I go looking for patio11's comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11)

just in case I missed a few while browsing threads from the front page and the
new page.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I disagree. I think that's not one of tptacek's better comments. He uses ad-
hom to support his (probably correct) evaluation that the person/subject of
the OP was not notable enough for a Wikipedia article. While ignoring /
distracting from the more important points about very real problems with the
administration of Wikipedia. The mere fact that many of the proposed additions
to Wikipedia are junk is not proof that all additions that get deleted by
admins are junk. To his credit, at least he boldly confesses in that post to
being a ranting windbag (his words). And to be clear, the real problem in this
particular case is not with tptacek's comment, but that HN'ers probably just
blindly upvoted his post because it was his, or because it appealed to their
own bias, not because it was any good.

~~~
tptacek
I agree that this isn't a great comment but I'm not seeing the fallacious ad
hominem.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia
where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be
deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's
notability rules.

Ad hom: Person objects to treatment they receive from Wikimods, therefore they
must lack experience.

Ad hom: List of articles for deletion containing articles that are all obvious
junk. Implies that all deleted articles must therefore have been junk. Maybe I
have inferred too much here, but that's what I thought you were going for, and
you have a point. There are probably a lot more pages that need deletion, but
it doesn't support the infallibility of Wikimods or refute the validity of
some of the complaints made by people about Wikimods. I have no idea if you
culled the list, but that might make it worse depending upon what you culled.

It's nothing worth getting our knickers in a twist for, and I guess I should
disclose that I have created/edited a few Wikipedia pages myself and often
found that experience, and working with some others on the site to be
frustrating. I'm not talking about vanity pages for my friend's bands either.
So I may have developed a natural reflex to unreserved or what I perceive to
be unjustified defenses of Wikimods.

~~~
jholman
Respectfully, I think you're wrong on both counts.

The first is an attempt at drawing a correlation. "When you observe fact-
pattern X, you can expect that property Y obtains." It might be derisive, but
it's not AdHom. He's not using an unrelated character assassination to
discredit an argument. I concede that it smells a bit ad-hom-y, but only
because he has a lot bad to say about the article (all of it supported, imo),
and so it kind of builds up momentum. That's the article's fault, though, for
being so wrong about so much (although the article is right that WP is a
complex (social) system, not perfectly documented).

(A related mistake, which I don't think you're necessarily making, is that of
thinking that anything that attacks credibility is AdHom. If you say "Bob is
always wrong about biochemistry, so he's probably wrong about this claim about
haemoglobin", that's not AdHom either.)

As for the second, your inference might have been reasonable (if
uncharitable), except that he later explains exactly why he brought it up: the
AfD process has to operate at scale, it's not expected to be infallible.
Combined with his other points about how notability has to work, it's build-up
for his paragraph that starts with "Anyone who can snark... betraying a deep
ignorance ...".

And I think it's a pretty decent comment, overall, because it has a virtue I
prize, of looking at a wrong-but-seductive view, and giving enough additional
context to help readers form a better picture. Though of course the
_magnitude_ of the upvoting depends on name-recognition.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>Respectfully, I think you're wrong on both counts.

You're probably not alone. I later noticed that it is tptacek's second highest
rated comment.

------
nealabq
The users _karma_ and _karmawhore_ respectively have 1 and 15 karma. Shows you
can't judge a book by its cover.

------
HyprMusic
Would be great if it linked to the user's profiles.

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ChikkaChiChi
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I generally don't look at people's usernames.
When I do its usually only to see if it matches the name of the submitter.

Do people really judge here based HN micro-celebrity-ness?

------
dfc
Giant pet peeves: I cant bookmark an individual user's page and I cant jump
from a user's page to their profile page on HN.

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swah
Odd, never seen a comment from Lightning.

~~~
jaredsohn
Almost all of that account's karma comes from articles rather than comments:

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=by%3ALigh...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=by%3ALightning&sortby=points+desc)

vs

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=by%3AL...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=by%3ALightning&sortby=points+desc&start=0)

The user has posted only one comments in the last 21 days and the highest
rated comment ever had only 8 points.

------
Gertig
Very nice! I'd love to have a link from each user's page back to their profile
page on HN.

