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Hacker News Karma Tracker

hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com

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Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#81

Post by brudgers »

mjn wrote: post #74
brudgers wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that a knack for timing and an ability to deliver something that others value might be individual qualities which YC might wish to develop in potential applicants who participate on HN?

I don't see it as very HN-specific. It's the exact same pattern you find at Reddit and Slashdot, so if YC is mainly attempting to cultivate that property, looking for users with the highest Reddit karma might be a good strategy (and they've proven themselves to a larger audience, probably more representative of average consumers). The negative way of looking at it is that it's most important just to be in the general…

YC can structure HN to simulate market conditions. They cannot do that with Reddit.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#82

Post by mjn »

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.

He/she submits a lot of stories, so you won't find the highly rated ones if you go back only a page or two, but you can find them this way: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=mtg...

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#84

Post by anthonyb »

brudgers wrote: post #58
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 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 this is where some of the 'snark' is coming from. In the race to get more karma, people are looking for the cheap throwaway one liner that everyone will snicker at and upvote.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#85

Post by Alex3917 »

dasil003 wrote: post #70
Alex3917 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Fair enough, I don't think it would need to be updated more than every few months though.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#86

Post by anthonyb »

zalzane wrote: post #42
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 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.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#87

Post by anthonyb »

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…

HN is slow enough already. I don't think anything that requires per-user (or per-pair-of-users) weighting is going to fly on most sites.

Re: Hacker News Karma Tracker

#88

Post by anthonyb »

brudgers wrote: post #71
mjn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the last point, one thing I've taken away from the HN karma system is that your votes are most highly correlated with the general traffic around a discussion, more than with anything specific to the comment. Posting almost anything decent on a story that sits on the front page for a day will get you double-digit upvotes, especially if it's an early comment. But posting something in an article that only briefly hit…

Are you suggesting that a knack for timing and an ability to deliver something that others value might be individual qualities which YC might wish to develop in potential applicants who participate on HN?

What you're describing is equally true of stand-up comedians as entrepreners and technical people.
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