Ask YC: How important are HN contribution to YC applications? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: How important are HN contribution to YC applications?

10 pointsbkbleikamp19 comments

Do people's contributions to Hacker News have weight in the decision if all else is equal?

Yes, at least in getting from the application to the interview phase. What matters is not so much the karma score as whether we recognise the username as someone who often submits good links or makes intelligent comments.

Maybe that's an opportunity to revamp the way karma is done?

Believe me, if I could think of a way to make karma more accurately reflect the value of comments, I'd already have done it.

This is something I've been mulling over for our site (one of the big US newsmags) which gets a lot of comments but has very limited community. One of the approaches I've decided to explore a little further is tying your karma to the votes on other articles, outside of a certain threshold. I'd like to use the threshold to prevent people from getting "bombed" if they upset the wrong person. The general hypothesis is that there is a relationship between the quality of your contribution and your support of quality contributions from others. the general implementation idea is that when you vote, it impacts your karma. For example, if you upvote an unhelpful but witty comment and others come and vote it down, you'd lose karma. If you voted up a comment that others also voted up, you'd gain karma. There are a lot of ways to game such a system, so you'd need to be really careful about the side-effects of this (it should probably only account for a small portion of your karma, for example) but I think it has promise nonetheless. I like to think of it sort of as Page Rank for comment karma.

The problem with this kind of approach is that you reward people whose opinions are closest to the average. Those are not the smart people.

You could end up biasing your community towards the mundane (the digg/fark model) if you aren't careful, but what I'm thinking about is something that instead of rewarding people who are "good voters" (for lack of a better term) instead seeks to reward those community members who consistently support high quality contributions.

I define "karma" as a means of valuing your contributions to the community, and it seems that this ought not be dominated simply by what you contribute in a literal sense, but also in what you contribute by encouraging others by voting up their valuable contributions. If our definitions differ, I can see that being the cause of the disagreement.

Wouldn't this just encourage people to "pile on" by upvoting things which already have high scores, or downvoting things which already have low scores?

That's why I emphasize that the key is making sure you set thresholds around it. For example, don't perform the calculation when the post has more than a 10% distribution in votes, or you could add a freshness component, so you would only gain the karma when you are the first upvote on something that ended up being popular.

Counting 'freshness' is even worse - that just turns the whole thing into a game of speculation. "Piling on" to existing popular consensus does enough damage to originality, but what you propose would explicitly reward a proactive chase of the lowest common denominator.

For an exploration of similar ideas, take a clicky: http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/473 (I actually think I might have seen here first, but forgotten to save it...)

It's worse only in the narrow context in which it's allowed to be dominant. This isn't a zero sum game. Taking the time differential between when a contribution was posted and when it first met a "value" threshold (say, 5 upvotes) and rewarding one of the people who voted in the affirmative by giving them, say, .25 karma points for it, does not reward the lowest common denominator. My hypothesis is that it might have exactly the opposite effect by encouraging those who might otherwise be excessively frugal with their votes to use their voting opportunities in a meaningful way.

In other words, if you want to look at this in absolutes and think that when I say that I think it's a good idea to take a given variable into account that I am somehow implying that the variable is free of all bias and in every other way perfect, you are making a mistake. You will never have high confidence for all of your variables when they describe human interaction, but that low confidence doesn't speak to the utility of the variable, it speaks to its importance in the overall calculation.

I understand that it's a small component of the overall system you envisage; I just believe that it's a small component pointing in the wrong direction.

If you boil it down, my point is that while "do people like what I say?" is a suboptimal scoring criterion, "do most other people like the same things I say I like?" is likely to be significantly worse.

Here´s an idea. Comments with downvotes are like spam. Comments with upvotes are like good email. Train spam filter with comments. Use auto karma for comments with few votes, maybe they were just late to the conversation. Comments with little votes get boosted or downgraded based on spammyness.

To that, I can only reply:

Startup Y Combinator startup Lisp Paul Graham startup startup hacker startup.

What about weighting votes based on karma + time on site? So the top 10 contributors would have karma votes that count for more than someone new to the site?

I'm not sure that I see that as fair.

Why is it just because you've been around for 5 years that your opinions should be greater than those of someone of 5 minutes? or that they should be greater than those who are too busy to spend every waking moment on HN. This would actually allow trolls who have nothing better to do to have better karma than those who actually make intelligent comments.

I think the karma system is fine, and in fact better than some others. The only thing I'd change is the # of karma points something need to get into the rss feed.

towel thrower!

Consider it the patented PG Private Karma System. In fact, I bet the PGPKS works much like the Dan Goldin Private Karma System. Participating and being recognized gets you opportunities that don't just happen randomly.

I'm not too great at networking or being recognized, but I'm working on it. In your case, I can tell you that if some guy came up off the street and introduced himself as Dan Goldin, I'd recognize you from here. Whether that would be worth anything to you is another story. ;)

(I guess I'm trying to say that the karma system doesn't matter so much as making an honest effort to say something worth saying.)

I suppose that's true but I've been thinking of some good ways to handle karma on community focused sites.

Maybe if you can wrap something up in a product it would be a good opportunity.

Some things I've been thinking about:

- Reward the early karma givers more than the latter to avoid the pile on (maybe give each poster a karma amount equal to a function of the karma given to the same post after them). So if I am the first one to upvote something, and the post ends up with 20 karma points, I get a f(20) or f(19) karma, depending whether I want to include myself.

- Give people a daily karma limit which is based on their current karma score

- Back in my early school days when I used Word I used to like having my papers rated on the "Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level" and was always trying to get the perfect score of 12. Maybe something like that could be included but that may be overkill - probably let it be entirely user driven.

- The ultimate purpose is to keep everything balanced and make the new users feel involved without being limited too much, so a lot of these ideas may need to be tested.

The HN userbase is extremely unique in the richness of experience of its users. There are many successful people here in a wide range of areas on all things Internet.

Identifying the value from the nonsense however may take a bit of effort for some people. I do believe that this is still an excellent resource for viable opinions.

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