What's the motivation behind posting these? Is there a way to say "these are the kinds of posts that are good for the community" without tacking a number on it?
Hacker News Leaderboard
41–50 of 59 posts
Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#42Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#43What's the motivation behind posting these? Is there a way to say "these are the kinds of posts that are good for the community" without tacking a number on it?
I would guess it correlates highly with number of posts, so I just think of it as a proxy for "highly active long-time users". Another measure could just be postcount. Karma is like a slightly "corrected" postcount that is supposed to boost people who post highly regarded posts, and downrank those who post a lot but mostly junk. But I would guess just raw number of posts is still the main explanatory factor in the ranking (I don't have the data to test this guess, unfortunately).
Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#44An aside, pg isn't on the leaderboards, and never was, since he was always far ahead on points. But, it looks like tptacek has finally passed him.
Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#45An aside, pg isn't on the leaderboards, and never was, since he was always far ahead on points. But, it looks like tptacek has finally passed him. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
Actually, pg was on the leaderboard for years. But, yes, his name was eventually removed, and while it was on the leaderboard, it was typically the top username by a very wide margin.
Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#46An aside, pg isn't on the leaderboards, and never was, since he was always far ahead on points. But, it looks like tptacek has finally passed him. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
Actually, pg was on the leaderboard for years. But, yes, his name was eventually removed, and while it was on the leaderboard, it was typically the top username by a very wide margin.
I thought the same thing and had to check the wayback machine. He wasn't on the leader boards, at least at that URL.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070302084140/http://news.ycombi...
http://web.archive.org/web/20090722153500/http://news.ycombi...
Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#47Ew
Yep.
Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#48Getting rid of scores on the top 10 was a step in the right direction, but ultimately the long-term goal should be to get rid of scores for the top 2000.
Slashdot used to have a thing where your karma would eventually just say something like, "Lots".
Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#49Re: Hacker News Leaderboard
#50I really like the average points tracking in Hacker news. Its interesting to note that some people got on the leader board via only commenting when their posts were relevant, the avg. 5+ points people and some got on their through just making sure their voice was heard, even if they didn't have anything relevant to say, the people with an avg below 3 points. I've always treated HN's a bit differently from other messa…
Like anybody, I have a reflexive tendency to feel pride when a number goes up, but pride in my average-point ranking is tempered by the knowledge that it's a statistic-of-convenience. It's not necessarily there because it's worth tracking or optimizing. It's there because the laziest possible stat, "total points," which tends to scale linearly with tenure and with volume of posts, became boring. So now we also have the second-laziest possible stat, "total points divided by total posts".
I have nothing against the simple stats -- why waste time on complex pseudoscience when basic pseudoscience will do? -- but the risk is that we'll design a stats page by adding numbers one at a time, in laziest-first order, until the screen starts to look cluttered, at which point we'll pick the most promising pattern we've spotted so far and start trying to optimize it. This is a great way to generate Powerpoint slides with lines that move up and to the right, and a lousy way to measure value. The micromanagement of statistical placebos is the occupational hazard of our age, and we should try to push back.
It's easy, too easy, to game my average-points ranking. I should contribute only popular thoughts to popular posts. I should assiduously avoid commenting on anything that's not on the homepage, or replying to people who are not near the top of a thread. I should make sure to comment within the newly-arrived-on-the-home-page time window, which is presumably now measured in milliseconds. I should certainly avoid giving advice to people on Ask HN.
That's no way to live.