The HN-ranking algo is not ideal. If you hit a popular discussion early you get way more points because you float on top of those who come later.
I fooled arround with it for a bit and now I'm at 740 points (still less than one karma a day). But mostly through consistent commenting and most of my comments remain at 1 point XD. Helping out with a wesite hugged to death by posting a google cache link makes people happy though.
You made me notice that my ranking right now is 1337, which is 1337. That is an average of 0.64 per day. I previously cared, but only because I was learning to hear and trust my inner voice, neither of which I was ready to do when I started participating on HN. Sharing my opinion here and having it be appreciated by others has been a large confidence booster.
Likes/ followers/ views/ karma points - all these counters make us users anxious even if we don't have some serious (a.k.a money) business to do with our online presence. I doubt if we will ever get used to it and I doubt whether the broad availibility of these counters/ analytics services is worthy. The context, the knowledge we get, the contributions we make should be the point, IMO.
Getting down to your question, you need to be informed (a.k.a. confident) or curious about the topic of the thread you're contributing to get karma points, I guess.
36 karma, joined 1061 days ago. Lurked casually probably 2 years before making an account.
I'm only just now graduated from college and working as a consultant, so never had a ton to add. Also I'm not technical, don't code, so a lot of the topics I read about here I am not close to qualifying to comment on.
Though it would be nice to get enough karma to downvote, probably gonna take 10 years to get there haha!
I created this throwaway account (mostly to vent) about a month ago, and I'm already at 126 points. I think people appreciate the sincerity of someone who does not need to self-censor himself?
I've been on HN for about 5 and half years. I rarely pay attention to my "karma" except for on a per-comment basis and only if it's negative as it normally means I was misunderstood or I misunderstand the downvotes and I edit or reply to a child to try and resolve the misunderstanding. Aside from that it doesn't really matter, most of my comments are completely ignored (no comments, no votes) and that's normally due to commenting on low-traffic posts, "late to the party", or just not something anyone found useful. Most of my "karma" comes from a handful of posts I've made on topic I am highly informed/involved with, when being very open/genuine, or useful tips/info.
For example in last 2 years (After 2 years I got tired of scrolling through my history):
For each one of the comments I made above there were probably another 5 that got 1-5 votes and then another 20 that never got a single vote.
Like I said at the start I don't pay much attention to it at all and if you do you probably are on HN for the wrong reasons. Just comment when you have a valuable opinion or information to add to a discussion and let the chips fall where they may.
I fooled arround with it for a bit and now I'm at 740 points (still less than one karma a day). But mostly through consistent commenting and most of my comments remain at 1 point XD. Helping out with a wesite hugged to death by posting a google cache link makes people happy though.
but yeah, nobody cares about internet points.