What Makes Hacker News Fame?

This is a nice analysis, although the causes of a high points per minute score could presumably be related to whether it gained an early vote / comment from a user with high karma (who is effectively giving it a stamp of approval).

This only had two points on 20 minutes when I voted for it though, so by their own logic is unlikely to make it to the FP!

Interesting post. I would like to see those plots on a logarithmic scale.

The effect "High karma can give you a little boost" is not due to HN karma itself. Many contributors to HN already have a reputation for good content and thus people are more likely to read/vote new submissions from them. So the boost is earned by the contributors by having impressed HN audience, not granted by HN solely based on past karma.

Oh right, so it really is a calculation of points vs age, according to the formula, plus penalties -- which my analysis didn't catch. Thanks for the background.

(This post sounds a bit too negative but it's not meant to be. Sorry for my poor communication style. Thanks for the informative post.)

> People can vote stories up or down (posts get +1 for an upvote, -1 for a downvote)

People can't downvote submissions. They can flag submissions and they can flag as well as downvote comments.

> It’s not entirely clear how karma is assigned but it’s safe to assume this is a measure of status.

Each point of karma is a single upvote on a submission or a comment. My high karma is purely a result of very frequent commenting, and has nothing to do with status. (Other people's high karma combined with high average karma is probably an indicator that people respect them. Some people have a weirdly low average - I don't understand how ColinWright only has an average of 1.7 or rayiner only has an average of 2.7 for examples).

A downvoted comment will reduce your karma by one point for each downvote. Flagged comments don't reduce your karma but may have other effects. A while ago I had a comment that got 50 downvotes - all of those were taken off my karma total. There was a problem where a controversial post might be flagkilled - limiting the total loss to whatever downvotes that post gets before it's flagkilled; or a controversial post just gets heavily downvoted but not flagkilled which means unlimited downvotes for the time that downvotes are available on that post. (Not sure if this has been changed yet, or if it's by design.)

> Karma isn’t meaningless. While plenty of users with low karma submitted posts that ascended to the front page, it looks like posts submitted by influencial users get to the front page more quickly (though the correlation is pretty weak).

Very few of my submitted articles make the front page. I'm tempted to say something about correlation and causation here - people who submit articles that make the front page get lots of karma, rather than users with lots of karma get front pages more easily.

About points per minute: There are some anti-gaming algorithms that will penalise a submission if it gets too many votes too quickly. I have no idea what the correct rate is.

There is also, I think, some algorithm that will detect many comments by new accounts. Announcing a post on social media is a mistake that some people make. New accounts then visit and upvote the submission, which demotes rather than promotes it.