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Hacker News Karma Tracker

hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com

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Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#91

Post by ekianjo »

anthonyb wrote: post #84
brudgers wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that your "Edit" hits the entire purpose of karma - encourage better writing. Karma for good posts. Karma for good submissions. What is sometimes a struggle is that better writing is not always what we wish it would be. Sometimes is well reasoned explanations. Sometimes it is passionate argument. And often, highly rated comments and articles become highly rated because of timing. Sometimes it is just showin…

I basically ignore karma these days. It doesn't encourage better writing, it encourages more off the cuff funny one liners. Here's an experiment of mine from a couple of months ago, on a duplicate news post: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=anthon... Do I really deserve that 69 points of karma? Is that 20 or 30 or 69 times more valuable than other posts where I've spent a lot more effort? Perhaps thi…

Karma is probably more closely related to how popular your opinion is on a given subject in the hacker news community. As you said it does not really encourage better writing, while there is sometimes a correlation between a good post and many upvotes, especially on very technical subjects.

Also, Karma on news submissions has become a race to be the first to publish the latest techcrunch news or related sites, so it's not all about comments or contents.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#92

Post by JoshTriplett »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #80
zalzane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

In a previous comment on karma systems I suggested a scheme where there was a voting 'diamond' up, down, left, right, and center. Where up was "good comment/submission" and down was "not-good comment/submission", left was "less like this", and right was "more like this" and center was perfect. That allows you to establish both what you like the site to have in it, and how you much you liked this instance of it. Perfe…

When would you ever vote "This is not good, more like this", or "this is good, less like this"?

The relative-karma system you described could work with one-axis karma, though. Interesting idea.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#93

Post by alanctgardner2 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #80
zalzane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

In a previous comment on karma systems I suggested a scheme where there was a voting 'diamond' up, down, left, right, and center. Where up was "good comment/submission" and down was "not-good comment/submission", left was "less like this", and right was "more like this" and center was perfect. That allows you to establish both what you like the site to have in it, and how you much you liked this instance of it. Perfe…

I had an idea to plot comment karma as a function of number of replies, and upvotes. So the axis would be 'discussion' and 'popularity'. A controversial opinion is probably unpopular but heavily discussed. Likewise, a pithy one-liner is popular but not discussed. Then you can see whether you tend to just parrot public sentiment and spout off-the-cuff remarks, or whether you create interesting conversations.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#94

Post by orangethirty »

This is a very good tool to track patterns in the community. Realize that each of the top 200 users represent a given demographic. If you see the change over time for each user, you can pinpoint those patterns and adjust to it (if you are selling something to that market). You can also quickly learn how to create your own organic circle of upvoters, so that your company posts hit the front page without needing to email everyone in your network so they can come in and upvote (which is do not approve of and not do). Its good to create your own niche audience inside such a powerful community like this one.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#95

Post by tzury » 

    pg (129961)

    As of: Mon Feb 04 2013 07:34:16 GMT+0200 (IST)
    Among all active users

    Total users: 13431
    Total users with less karma: 13430
    Your rank: 1st
    Overall karma percentile: 100.00%

    Average karma increase per day: 56.260
    Total users with slower increasing karma: 13427
    Your speed rank: 4th
    Speed percentile: 99.98%
    Among active users from your registration month (October 2006)

    Total users: 9
    Total users with less karma than you: 8
    Your rank: 1st
    Percentile: 100.00%

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#96

Post by fusiongyro »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #80
zalzane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

In a previous comment on karma systems I suggested a scheme where there was a voting 'diamond' up, down, left, right, and center. Where up was "good comment/submission" and down was "not-good comment/submission", left was "less like this", and right was "more like this" and center was perfect. That allows you to establish both what you like the site to have in it, and how you much you liked this instance of it. Perfe…

The problem with your proposal is that most people think they're objective most of the time. The less/more like this distinction relies on people knowing and admitting that sometimes the stuff they like is not better than the stuff they don't like.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#97

Post by hu_me »

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.

ah good to know. in that case 11k are the total active users in last 2 weeks. so going forward would your service retain data from 25 Jan onwards or only for the past 2weeks.

I'd think that if it retains data from 25th within a few months it would be able to show a very good estimate of total active users

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#98

Post by kstenerud »

petenixey wrote: post #45
zalzane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Karma is a tool to promote social cohesiveness in a group. By allowing peers to reward and punish others, it provides a "majority rules" code of conduct that is as fluid as the whim of the mob.

This is good for building a sense of community where in-person interaction is infeasible, but it also brings with it the bad qualities (group think, punishment of new ideas that contradict the norm, cliques, personality cults, etc).

The good news is that there are oddballs in every group who ignore the social rules (karma) and present ideas that are novel (but perhaps unpalatable) to the group despite the meting out of punishments (which are ignored). They are the antibodies that fight off the cancerous growth of tribalism.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#99

Post by pc86 »

anthonyb wrote: post #86
zalzane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This is why I was against hiding karma on posts. I suspect that it drives the points reward up for one liners, since there's no way to balance things downwards, ie. not upvote or downvote if you think a post has too many points. And I think the upvote is pretty much set in stone now. It's essentially "I like this post" or "I don't like this post", there's not much nuance.

I wasn't around at that point, but I disagree with you. Let me explain why.

You shouldn't downvote a comment because it "has too many points." If you think a post deserves a downvote, do so. Whether 25 or five or zero people before you thought so shouldn't play any role in how you perceive the quality of that post.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#100

Post by anthonyb »

pc86 wrote: post #99
anthonyb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I was against hiding karma on posts. I suspect that it drives the points reward up for one liners, since there's no way to balance things downwards, ie. not upvote or downvote if you think a post has too many points. And I think the upvote is pretty much set in stone now. It's essentially "I like this post" or "I don't like this post", there's not much nuance.

I wasn't around at that point, but I disagree with you. Let me explain why. You shouldn't downvote a comment because it "has too many points." If you think a post deserves a downvote, do so. Whether 25 or five or zero people before you thought so shouldn't play any role in how you perceive the quality of that post.

But in aggregate, it means that a throwaway one liner becomes much more valuable (from a karma/algorithm perspective at least). It removes a large amount of control from the people commenting.
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