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Hacker News Karma Tracker

hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com

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Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#61

Post by a_p »

andreasvc wrote: post #23
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 last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. It doesn't seem surprising to me. It takes effort to recognize quality, most people aren't going to bother. It makes sense that quality is hard to measure, because…

I think that it is hacker etiquette to only pass judgement when you are qualified to do so. This is why funny comments that don't require specialized knowledge are upvoted more than insightful comments.

The Slashdot comment system tries to correct this by awarding karma to "interesting" or "insightful" comments and not giving karma points to users with "funny" comments. Of course, the downside to this is that the poster of a comment that many find to be funny can end up with bad karma because one "flamebait" mod counts for more than six "funny" mods.

The problem with Slashdot is comments that are flat out wrong are often moderated as insightful. This probably happens because moderators feel obligated to upvote what they perceive to be "intelligent" comments even when they are not qualified to judge them as such.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#62

Post by biot »

yesimahuman wrote: post #52
freework wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats because someone typed in that username with a trailing space character ("mtgx ") and it made a new entry for that username int eh database. Nothing a little .strip won't fix...

For an account only 290 days old, mtgx has a ton of karma. Any idea who that is or where the karma comes from? Don't see many highly rated posts or comments in their feed.

Submitting stories. Whoever submitted Bellard's jsLinux story received as much karma (3000+) for that one URL and title as I had from several years of comment writing.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#63

Post by freework »

mwill wrote: post #35
martinced wrote: post #11

Cool... But it would be nice if all these "small" (not criticizing in any way here) websites allowed either query parameters in the URL or directly "short URLs" (like bit.ly etc.) so we could share links. (maybe I missed it?)

Now that you mention it, it's sort of surprising that there's not a url for each user. It's not quite as useful, but a quick look at network activity shows the data gets pulled from /user/[name].json, like: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/user/martinced.json /user/[name] without the .json hits an error, unfortunately.

You can now view the page without the .json and it should show the the data in a html page.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#64

Post by dougk16 »

lisper wrote: post #40

I think you're missing an important metric: karma per submission. People with high KPS tend to be those who keep their mouths shut most of the time but when they do have something to say it's generally worth paying attention. I think this is the kind of behavior that really ought to be encouraged more than contributions per unit time. Also, the see-your-data feature fails on Safari.

Not sure if you strictly mean karma per submission, or karma per comment, or both. As for karma per comment at least, reaching a critical mass of absolute karma points seems to have a big impact on your KPC, regardless of the comment's content, thus partly invalidating the value of KPS/KPC.

I just anecdotally see karma peasants post comments that are functionally identical to comments from the karma kings, and the peasants just get buried at the bottom. It would interesting to have some kind of NLP-based crawler go through HN and see to what extent that actually happens though...maybe it's just my imagination.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#65

Post by DanBC »

Udo wrote: post #17
eksith wrote: post #12

It's just a number in a database. What you say and how you say it is more important than what other people think of it. If your words are important to you and you said them in earnest, why does it matter? Side note: You may even be unconsciously censoring yourself in fear of losing karma. It's a similar effect to suddenly having a lot of followers on Twitter.

Sure, but karma is an important measurement of the (perceived) quality of your posts. If a comment gets upvoted that's not only because people agree with you but also because they think your comment has value. Likewise, if a comment gets downvoted, that's a fair indicator it did not have a lot of merit. Of course, HN distorts this somewhat by just having one score for all the possible reasons a user might have to vot…

> inevitably superstar posters get upvoted reflexively

It would be interesting to see if hiding usernames for 24 hours has any effect on voting.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#66

Post by jaredsohn »

seferphier wrote: post #46

very cool piece of work. Would be even cooler if I could get stats of my most popular threads and comments. It would be also interesting to see pg's most popular thread and comment.

You can do this via hnsearch. pg's most popular comments: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=pg&#38...

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#67

Post by jaredsohn »

Some other stats that could be interesting:

Show how many people / what percentage have 500 karma (which presumably is what it takes to downvote.)

Show how much karma a person would currently need to be at the 25th, 50th, 66th, 75th, 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles (or whatever percentiles make sense).

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#68

Post by jaredsohn »

jaredsohn wrote: post #67

Some other stats that could be interesting: Show how many people / what percentage have 500 karma (which presumably is what it takes to downvote.) Show how much karma a person would currently need to be at the 25th, 50th, 66th, 75th, 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles (or whatever percentiles make sense).

The above computed manually (by looking at the monthly lists to finds users at various karma levels and determining their percentiles):

Percentile for 500 karma: 73%

Rough karma thresholds for percentiles:

25% 12

50% 110

66% 333

75% 575

90% 1760

95% 3100

99% 9700

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#70

Post by dasil003 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #57
akkartik wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to do, now that comment scores are no longer public. I can also think of some useful analyses if user votes were public. It might also help control gaming by surfacing voting rings and so on.

"Hard to do, now that comment scores are no longer public." Submission scores are still public, so all you'd have to do is subtract submission karma from total karma.

It's a hell of a lot more crawling though, given that old submissions can be upvoted indefinitely.
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