Ask HN: How to earn karma on HN? - xcoding
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fuqted
Judging from my upvotes the best way to go about it is to go to a popular
comment in an over-crowded thread and leave your short, witty and unoffending
thoughts. This method is probably the most time efficient. Spray and pray.

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dredmorbius
Worry about contributing positively to the site.

Karma will take care of itself.

And really, it's not worth much.

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reitanqild
All described in the guidelines.

Post useful stuff, make useful comments.

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minimaxir
Write good comments.

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Tomte
Submissions get you an order of magnitude more karma than comments.

It _may_ be different for "famous" people like tptacek and Animats who are
instantly recognized in any comment thread, so that lots of highly upvoted
comments make up for the comment/submission discrepancy.

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minimaxir
Odds of getting a good submission upvoted are very, very low relative to the
odds of having a good comment upvoted (will almost always be seen). From an EV
perspective, it is better.

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xcoding
Thank you.

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kodfodrasz
Just post The Right Opinion™ and Independent Thinkers™ from the Silicon
Valley® California© will upvote you.

Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes.

It is also very important, to always post in a manner which cannot insult a
demographic (eg. Independent Thinkers™), unless the insulted demographic does
not represent the The Right Opinion™ (eg. realists, conservatives, anti-
globalists, Drumpf voters, law abiding tax paying majorities, especially males
can always be insulted).

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teslabox
> Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes.

Is there a way to figure out a comment's ratio of upvotes to downvotes?
Sometimes I see my comment's score oscillating...

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dredmorbius
No.

This is, frankly, a really annoying aspect of many commenting systems. It's
among the reasons I prefer range-based voting (say 1-5 scale) rather than
up/down. On the back end it's possible to do some aggregate modeling that
works out, for large numbers, somewhat equivalently, but this handles thin
data poorly.

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hon08
Submit content suited to the site, as per Hacker News guidelines. Hopefully if
you've been there a while you are aware of this, but here it is again just in
case: Hacker News Guidelines. The first two paragraphs in the guidelines sum
it all up:!

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic. Timing. I don't live in the US myself, and since roughly half of the
site's users are in the US, the time of day makes a big difference in seeing
your submission hitting the front page or floating to the bottom.

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venomsnake
Submit famous person death article, SJW or anti think piece, apple articles or
articles that claim the latest FOTM siver bullet is bullshit.

