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Comment by mrlyc | Hacker News Reader

That article reminds me of The Auditors in Terry Pratchett's "The Thief of Time" who try to analyse a painting by reducing it to its component molecules.

There is no mention of tailoring comments and replies to the target audience. Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month.

I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience.

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> I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience.

Just link a bunch of studies to anything you say.[^1] It doesn't actually matter if they're related.[^2] No one really checks the sources anyway.[^3]

[^1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.02876

[^2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02728

[^3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03799

This hasn't been true for me.

My top 3 posts [0, 1, 2] are all fairly trite. All three of these were rated much higher than posts with extensive citations.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13538068

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13441744

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594765

Edited:

This post already has a higher score than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180432 which has five citations.

Compare this low-effort comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124411

to these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149200

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016438

Getting "in" when a post has few comments and is going to attract a lot of comment readership quickly or stay on the frontpage for a while is probably more important than pure comment quality.

Absolutely true, and especially problematic because by their nature high-quality comments will take more time to formulate and therefore always be late to the party and get less visibility.

Haha no way. My highest rated posts have all been some vapid feel-good thing that I posted shortly after an article was submitted to HN. My detailed explanations that link to studies rarely get more than 10 points (same phenomenon occurs on Quora as well actually...)

I always wonder how much these factors affect a comment's score:

* Proximity to the top of the page

* Time of day posted

* Number of sibling comments and the score of those comments

On reddit, for example, it seems impossible to get noticed once there are already a few highly-upvoted replies to the comment you're replying to.

I've been kicking myself that I didn't take sociology in university to study conversational dynamics on threaded internet forums. It continues to fascinate me

> I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience.

I can't tell for sure it's intended, but this sounds Machiavellian. And also following your own stated advice. Compliment the audience on being tough -- tell us what we want to hear -- in order to be rewarded with upvotes. Nice work.

Just ask everyone who offers an anecdote for citations, and tell everyone which named bias their point of view is.

> Once I adopted the mindset of a senior high school or college student and posted accordingly, I was able to increase my karma on Reddit from 1,000 per year to 1,000 per month.

Why, though?

I've written many, many articles/analysis about the karma systems of Reddit/Hacker News.

Karma aggregates are meaningless internet points. Neither Reddit nor Hacker News, nor their users, give major impact to how much user a user has (aside for low karma aggregate thresholds for downvoting on HN), nor is there any correlation between the amount of karma and the quality of content that user outputs.

Sure, in aggregate they're meaningless internet points. As a speaker/writer, though, you can use the score on an individual comment you've made, as a rough approximation of how well it managed to communicate its intent: if a comment you've made scores really highly, it can do well to stare at it and attempt to figure out what you did that made it work for people.

Saying that a 20pt comment is better than a 5pt comment because solely of its intrinsic quality is confirmation bias. There are many factors which help determine the score a comment receives, some of which are noted in the paper (time-of-day comment was made, time comment was made relative to the time original post was submitted, the score of the parent, etc.)

For example, this comment made today, which is literally just a quotation, is at 13pts currently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178760

But it was a quotation in response to a top rated comment in a top rated thread.

Oh, sure, a factor of 1-10x is noise.

But if you normally write comments that earn 1-5 points, and then one comment earns 300pts, there might be something to the way you wrote it. Or might not. It might just be that you wrote the rebuttal everyone wanted to the stupid comment in a very popular thread.

But you should try to figure that out, because if—after eliminating sources of error—you're still left with an anomalously-high score, then the cause was probably you.

More than just with highly-positive scores, though, I also tend to analyze the type of writing I put into comments that ended up with negative scores. More often than not, it seems that my own problem is that I didn't sprinkle in enough "hedging words" (like the 'more often than not' in this sentence) and then someone came along with a single counterexample and a downvote storm ensued. I wouldn't have figured out that people had that reaction if the points weren't there.

Hedging words that show awareness of the difference between opinion and fact in particular seem [1] to be pretty key here.

I think[2] analysing which comments get up voted can be very helpful if you're doing so when looking at writing style. but when approached with an eye towards content, it seems[3] like it would lead to the echo chamber effect that often gets raised as an issue.

[1] there goes one of those hedging words now

[2] oops, there's another.

[3] and a third. It would be interesting to see the ratio of filler/hedging/weasel words to votes in HN vs elsewhere.

A point score normalized according to the total number of points in the thread could at least make it possible to compensate for the 'general popularity' variation of different articles.

How about slashdot with 'insightful' / 'informative' / 'interesting' / 'funny', upvotes?

Does a system where the more karma you have the more power your upvotes have work?

Is there a better system?

Does HN even respect karma? My guess is no and is just there as a red herring(not necessarily intentionally) that keeps people from cracking the real metrics it's using.

What do you mean by respect karma? Obviously the ordering of sibling comments is determined in some way by upvotes and downvotes.

Just post something about React Fiber.

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