Ha! when I wrote that it was 5 years... now it's > 8 years. I think the same conclusion still applies: "So, to answer my original question about how I ended up with that much karma: slowly, consistently, over years by submitting things that people like."
Use the car more frequently and for longer distances and the odometer will advance more rapidly.
So I'm looking for a counterpoint except that this is actually quite a good analogy (ignoring the quibble that a good driver can move to a new car with a fresh odometer but retain a good driving record. Or that there is no legal odometer equivalent to being downvoted)
Edit: grammar
I'd be interested to see the relationship between comment karma and age of post though - do earlier comments always get more attention?
I even set noprocrast to something like 100 years, and quit cold turkey for a while... And then got pg to reset it for me.
"How did I succeed? I just followed the rules."
First hand, everyone sees that as bullshit. I like your contributions to this community. Don't be ashamed to say, "cuz I'm awesome like that."
Most importantly, write a lot of comments, over years. Karma is primarily an odometer. I get 2X the karma per comment, but Thomas writes 4X the comments.
Develop a beat on which you are known as a source of expert, reliable knowledge. There are other security people on HN, but Thomas is fairly reliably stapled to the top of any thread about security. That is not not justified.
Write well. Have a voice. You can pick out most of Thomas' comments, and virtually all of his value-adding comments, immediately by his writing style. He's one of the five best writers on the site, without question. (Honest opinion rather than playing praise-my-friend-and-cofounder. It's not a close call.) You could ask him "Thomas, I am going to name one item in your kitchen. Write about it for two minutes. Ready? Parsnip, go." and it would be one of the ~10 best written comments on HN that day.
There exists an observation I can make here about choosing which threads to participate in, which would have the effect of increasing one's karma but which is not necessarily something HN wants to encourage. I have 100% confidence that "Boosting my karma score" is not the reason why Thomas chooses threads to engage in, but be that as it may, I'll add it for completeness: the high-heat low-light threads about nerd politics result in getting lots of upvotes for fairly little effort, regardless of whether you conform with HN's community norms or whether you are the designated contrary voice. (Designated contrary voice is worth a lot of upvotes if you do it well.)
Not related, but worth mentioning in case it isn't obvious: he really, really doesn't care about his karma score. Profoundly does not care. It happens to reward him for being "message board nerd" (his favored phrasing for this psychograph) but Thomas would play message board nerd for free and, indeed, at substantial cost.
I've made a bunch of friends from HN, but among my real-world friends, the HN karma thing is an embarrassment; I'm needled over it constantly.
The most under-appreciated writer on HN is 'tzs, for what it's worth.
Individual comments score helps me to decide what comment to pay more attention to.
Of course they system could be improved by counting comment wait based on my past preferences.
(E.g. if my upvotes correlate with patio11 upvotes, then patio11 upvote is more valuable to me than average user's upvotes).
But even without upvote score calcualtion improvement - it is better to have existing "averaged" score, than no score at all.
Finally, if vanity is not your thing - just do not pay attention to your own score. Upvotes score information is valuable for other reasons.
That's the secret to all success!
201 points comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309#up_4073928