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Hacker News Karma Tracker

hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com

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Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#41

Post by kens »

RKoutnik wrote: post #3
MichaelApproved wrote: post #2

Why are the usernames case sensitive? michaelapproved is not a valid username when searching but MichaelApproved is. Does HN allow for different case usernames or is it something that was overlooked during development of the search feature?

HN overall has case-sensitive usernames. Drove me batty until I figured it out. You can ask pg why he went with that particular design choice.

Looking at the news.arc code, user profiles are stored as files in the directory arc/news/profile/, so the names there are case sensitive because of the underlying file system. The users are loaded into a map using the name as a key, and map lookups are case sensitive in Arc. Thus, both the on-disk and in-memory storage of users is case sensitive. Of course names could be converted to a case-insensitive form, but the "natural" implementation results in case-sensitivity.

The code can be downloaded from http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar Note the code is from 2009 and didn't exactly match the running HN code at the time, so any conclusions from the published code aren't guaranteed. I did an analysis of the HN ranking formula back in 2009 - http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.h... - but the live formula is surely very different from the published code by now. And ironically, that article got about 0 upvotes so it didn't rank well :-)

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#42

Post by zalzane »

Xcelerate wrote: post #9

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research... It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, becau…

>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight.

I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system.

This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing the "meaning" of the upvote. Right now, the upvote is a tool that allows you to make a comment more visible and to throw a bone to the author in the form of karma. People probably feel inclined to "tip" someone who makes a clever or witty comment with the karma from the upvote. On top of that, people making witty comments who get upvoted are now encouraged to make more witty and unproductive comments because they know that they will get karma for it.

The issue is that the upvote represents general approval of a comment, rather than a nod of the head that a comment is productive or insightful.

Just throwing around ideas - maybe the elimination of the user-karma-tracking system altogether is a reasonable solution?

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#43

Post by kmfrk »

dave1010uk wrote: post #29

Is it easy to separate karma aquired from submissions and karma aquired from comments? My average comment karma is below 3 and I've only had a few comments over 20 but most of my karma has come from 2 or 3 submissions of interesting links, which seems almost like cheating. I think the most karma I ever got was from being the first to post about Sublime Text 2. This was interesting but I only got the karma because I b…

Karma is nothing but an algorithmic parameter. I wouldn't think anything else of it.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#44

Post by pyre »

freework wrote: post #38
hu_me wrote: post #32

it lists total users as 11777 that looks like a very small number for hn which sends 10-20k visits if a site hits top spot. or are there a lot of lurkers who never signup?

Since HN doesn't publish a userlist, this site gets its data by crawling the "latest posts" HNSearch API every ten minutes. That 11,000 users includes all users who have made a post on HN since January 25th. Thats right, 11,000 unique users have means post on Hacker News in the past 2 weeks.

It's not entirely accurate because of this. HNSearch API allows you to list users ordered by karma. According to that, I'm ~120. According to this site, I'm 94. Heh.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#45

Post by petenixey »

zalzane wrote: post #42
Xcelerate wrote: post #9

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research... It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, becau…

>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system. This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing…

I can't speak for PG but being in the middle of designing a karma system for our application, karma is an incredibly powerful tool to encourage engagement.

Karma's value to the casual visitor is in communicating quality content that's been flagged by the community worker bees - the karma "waggle dance" :) From that perspective you want to be critical and only add weight to the "best things".

However karma also plays a very significant role in guiding people as to how to modify their behaviour such that the community appreciates them. We all want to be liked by communities we identify with and karma is a powerful tool to see how we can "fit in".

Karma is an incredibly powerful tool to communicate in a very discrete way to new community members how they can establish themselves.

As the karma-moderator I find myself looking to give the community ways award karma wherever I can. I'm not worried about how insignificant the effort that it was rewarding; all I want to do is give people encouragement when they do something (anything) the community appreciates.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#47

Post by DanBC »

Capricornucopia wrote: post #37

Does anyone have advice about improving my karma? I'm roughly 42nd percentile. I suppose lurking doesn't help.

Cynically: many stories are reposted. Discover what those are, and what the popular opinions on them are. Then monitor new, and make the popular comment early to reap most karma.

Commenting at the right time seems to help.

Having a single thought per post also helps; people tend to upvote if they agree with the entire post.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#48

Post by untog »

zalzane wrote: post #42
Xcelerate wrote: post #9

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research... It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, becau…

>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system. This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing…

The obvious answer here would be Slashdot's system- not just upvotes, but specific categories of upvote. It seems to work well, but it does add an overhead to the action of upvoting an item.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#49

Post by simias »

zalzane wrote: post #42
Xcelerate wrote: post #9

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research... It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, becau…

>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system. This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing…

slashdot does let you choose the meaning of your "upvote". While its comment system is far from perfect, it does have many good ideas. For some reason, I felt like karma whoring was less of an issue back when I was over there. Maybe because you could only be upvoted 5 times per comment, and you couldn't directly submit stories.
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