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Hacker News Karma Tracker

hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com

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Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#51

Post by untog »

Capricornucopia wrote: post #37

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

I know this is going to sound preachy, but the best way to improve your karma is probably to stop thinking about how to improve your karma.

That is, just post your thoughts on a topic, written as best you can. At least, that's worked well for me and probably most other high percentile-ers. Don't start pandering to what you think will attract a lot of upvotes- karma is meaningless after all.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#52

Post by yesimahuman »

freework wrote: post #39
ghiculescu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mtgx is first and second on http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars , too.

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.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#53

Post by akkartik »

Alex3917 wrote: post #33

It would be nice to see the list by comment karma only. That's the one list that I haven't actually seen anyone create so far.

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.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#54

Post by tikhonj »

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…

This also depends on what your interests are. For example, my primary interests are in programming languages, functional programming, type theory and so on. My highest voted comments have mostly been fairly long ones in these topics.

Moreover, most of them were pretty constructive: things like explaining how to generalize pattern-matching, how typeclasses are useful, what FRP is or even just how your editor can display Haskell syntax with Unicode. (It's like an awesome version of syntax highlighting.)

Admittedly, my single highest-scoring post was a bit less constructive: a rant about Go. However, in my defense, it was a long rant with substantial details and examples. And, honestly, I'd be extremely happy if it saved some people from learning Go and got them to consider Haskell or OCaml instead.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#55

Post by dakimov »

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…

Basically, be as mediocre and stereotypic as possible, conform to the crowd, please everyone, this is what you are talking about? Maybe, it's an inherent problem with the "karma" system. It encourages you to avoid saying what you really think unless you are a Mr. or Ms. Mediocrity. This gets even nastier considering that most people are narrow-minded and aggressive.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#56

Post by dfc »

I have always wondered what the top karma list would look like if it was broken down into two lists: comment karma and submission karma. Has anyone done this?

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#57

Post by Alex3917 »

akkartik wrote: post #53
Alex3917 wrote: post #33

It would be nice to see the list by comment karma only. That's the one list that I haven't actually seen anyone create so far.

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.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#58

Post by brudgers »

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…

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 showing up (80% of the time, Woody Allen may have said).

It's satisfying to make a pitch perfect comment - even more so I find when it isn't snark or mean. I know what my best comments have been, and I know these are not the same as my highest rated. My best comments have been ones that I've cared about and some of those have even gone negative.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#59

Post by davidw »

akkartik wrote: post #50

The beta testers: https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/october-2006 . I had no idea John Resig of jQuery fame is a YC alum. Then there's a gap of three months months before the early adopters: https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/february-2007 .

That's a neat list... a portion of those people were early adopters on reddit as well and a lot of the names look quite familiar.

That makes 6 years of HN... time flies!

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#60

Post by dfc »

simias wrote: post #49
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…

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.

This is the one thing I have always missed about slashdot discussions. I rarely value the "humorous" posts on sites like this. It is not that I do not find the jokes funny, I do, its just that I'd rather increase the SNR even at the cost of a few chuckles. I think the big impediment to widespread adoption is the difficulty in creating an useful interface for tracking "kind of upvote" and then filtering based on type of upvote. I always had my slashdot prefs set up so that I never saw the "+5 funny comments."
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