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Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

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Re: Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

#3
That article reminds me of The Auditors in Terry Pratchett's "The Thief of Time" who try to analyse a painting by reducing it to its component molecules.

There is no mention of tailoring comments and replies to the target audience. Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month.

I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience.

Re: Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

#4
post #3

That article reminds me of The Auditors in Terry Pratchett's "The Thief of Time" who try to analyse a painting by reducing it to its component molecules. There is no mention of tailoring comments and replies to the target audience. Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month. I still have…

> I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience.

Just link a bunch of studies to anything you say.[^1] It doesn't actually matter if they're related.[^2] No one really checks the sources anyway.[^3]

[^1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.02876

[^2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02728

[^3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03799

Re: Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

#5
post #3

That article reminds me of The Auditors in Terry Pratchett's "The Thief of Time" who try to analyse a painting by reducing it to its component molecules. There is no mention of tailoring comments and replies to the target audience. Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month. I still have…

> I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience.

I can't tell for sure it's intended, but this sounds Machiavellian. And also following your own stated advice. Compliment the audience on being tough -- tell us what we want to hear -- in order to be rewarded with upvotes. Nice work.

Re: Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

#6
post #3

That article reminds me of The Auditors in Terry Pratchett's "The Thief of Time" who try to analyse a painting by reducing it to its component molecules. There is no mention of tailoring comments and replies to the target audience. Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month. I still have…

I've written many, many articles/analysis about the karma systems of Reddit/Hacker News.

Karma aggregates are meaningless internet points. Neither Reddit nor Hacker News, nor their users, give major impact to how much user a user has (aside for low karma aggregate thresholds for downvoting on HN), nor is there any correlation between the amount of karma and the quality of content that user outputs.

Re: Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

#8

This seems like a really fun project to try and reproduce!

I wrote a blog post along similar lines around when the orignal paper was published: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/

Unfortunately, since comment scores are still omitted from the API, it would be hard to modernize this analysis. (and the algorithms have definitely changed over the years)

Re: Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

#9
post #3

That article reminds me of The Auditors in Terry Pratchett's "The Thief of Time" who try to analyse a painting by reducing it to its component molecules. There is no mention of tailoring comments and replies to the target audience. Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month. I still have…

> I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience. Just link a bunch of studies to anything you say.[^1] It doesn't actually matter if they're related.[^2] No one really checks the sources anyway.[^3] [^1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.02876 [^2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02728 [^3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03799

This hasn't been true for me.

My top 3 posts [0, 1, 2] are all fairly trite. All three of these were rated much higher than posts with extensive citations.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13538068

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13441744

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594765

Edited:

This post already has a higher score than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180432 which has five citations.

Re: Hacking the Hivemind: Predicting Comment Karma on Internet Forums (2014) [pdf]

#10
post #3

That article reminds me of The Auditors in Terry Pratchett's "The Thief of Time" who try to analyse a painting by reducing it to its component molecules. There is no mention of tailoring comments and replies to the target audience. Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month. I still have…

I've written many, many articles/analysis about the karma systems of Reddit/Hacker News. Karma aggregates are meaningless internet points . Neither Reddit nor Hacker News, nor their users, give major impact to how much user a user has (aside for low karma aggregate thresholds for downvoting on HN), nor is there any correlation between the amount of karma and the quality of content that user outputs.

Sure, in aggregate they're meaningless internet points. As a speaker/writer, though, you can use the score on an individual comment you've made, as a rough approximation of how well it managed to communicate its intent: if a comment you've made scores really highly, it can do well to stare at it and attempt to figure out what you did that made it work for people.
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