Show HN: Inflation-adjusted Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Inflation-adjusted Hacker News

instruments.digital

437 pointsAaronmacaron120 comments

Pretty soon 100 karma won't even buy you a gallon of milk, much less the small 2-bedroom colonial home it used to back in '08 or '09. (Not counting east or west coasts... Hard to find anything under 300 karma there.)

At least it's still harder currency than FB likes or Twitter retweets. Those internet points might as well be $5 billion Zimbabwe notes.

The really funny part being of course that there is an actual business out there out of fb likes, instagram followers and retweets

https://blog.saleslayer.com/selling-on-tiktok#influencers They tell businesses to partner with tiktok influencers for direct advertising, so that some people are actually able to turn internet points into money (by analogy: maybe there is a point for businesses to partner with any one on this list: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ?) Also a lot of stuff on youtube contains some form of direct advertising as part of the video.

I'll upvote comments on HN for $0.03 each.

don't know about upvotes, but if you post a comment that is praising some product then you might try to sell it based on the number of upvotes on that comment (disclaimer: i have no idea how direct marketing is actually done)

That's very true, and reminds me: reading HN can be thirsty work, and when that thirst comes calling I reach for an ice cold Coke. Nothing goes down better with the smug satisfaction of becoming a quick Google expert on a topic you only knew existed 5 minutes ago than the classic taste of Coke. So the next time a front-page post on the successor technology to CRISPR comes across your screen and you franticly go down the rabbit hole of what the heck CRISPR was in the first place, don't try one of those other cola's, go for the one and only Coke.

this one got my upvote, it seems to work.

That means it worked for ineedasername, who makes money that way, but did it work for the Coca Cola company? What did you drink while upvoting? Are you out buying Coke now?

It's my understanding that for major brands like Coca Cola, the goal of their advertising is not to convert users but instead to remain ubiquitous in the users mind when thinking about cola, so that you basically "coca cola, and then the others".

That's why they blast so much advertising even in place when the people are obviously already converted, they want to keep the status quo of them being the real cola, and the others being, well, cute alternatives but not the real thing. It seems to work, even the popular joke "pepsi, for when there is no coke" shows it. People in a restaurant don't ask "do you have a cola ?" they ask "I'll have a Coke" because obviously they have a cola and obviously it's Coke (which is funny since Pepsi rules b2bn while Coca Cola rules b2c).

So for Coca Cola, a victory is not for him to be out buying Coke right now, it's him thinking "Coke" when he should think "cola".

> What did you drink while upvoting? Are you out buying Coke now?

Vodka, only vodka, my son (and parent post by Someone got an upvote from me too)

I am actually, but not the kind from the coca cola company ...

(This comment was brought to you by that one guy on the corner)

what's the difference of making money off of fb, insta, and twtr rather than off radio or tv ads?

Anyone can get followers on social media. But to get on radio or tv, you need connections and money. Also not a lot of people listen to radio or watch tv anymore, especially the younger generation. So if you want to target them, you need to advertise on social media.

I'm not sure how much tracking Twitter does, but in the case of fb and Instagram it's the amount of privacy violating data harvesting they gather and use to target, which has lots of negative uses. That aside, I don't think there's a lot of difference between a fb display ad or tv commercial. If data harvesting and hyper targeting went away I would have much less of an issue with them.

I guess we can expect the karma devaluation.

It's really a strong case in point for why karma needs to be mined in a PoW blockchain. I think if HN did an Initial Karma Offering (IKO) there would be plenty of takers. Airdrop some to Elon at the same time and we'll be all set.

There's a similar issue on reddit. For a growing sub (which most interesting subs are) sorting by top of all time and top of this year is the same thing. I wish there were a way to sort by top by year on a sub (and HN too of course).

Another effect to consider is that given that the number of "slots" on the front page hasn't changed, the time you have to rack up threshold upvotes to hit the front page will have reduced. New posts fall off the "new" page much quicker.

Might be interesting to plot the number of new posts per day over the years as well, if that data is accessible. I would guess it would inflate at the same rate.

https://redditsearch.io may help a bit with these types of queries. Bummer that there is no native way to do so.

For HN, you should know about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=custom&page=0&prefix=false...

The Lists on HN are also useful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

You'd think this is the kind of issue reddit could solve instead of figuring out how to spam you with emails faster or creating snoo avatars.

Like most social networks, history is largely irrelevant to how they make money. They need to keep you clicking on the new, the ephemeral, and the unusual, serving up ads and collecting information about your interests, hobbies, habits, and biases to refine the ad targeting.

After a year or two "most popular" no longer means much for those sites.

The problem with useful history is that it reminds people that information quality can be time-independent. I can read something written 20 years ago... anytime in the next decade, without a huge difference.

Which tends to directly clash with the temporal rat-race design used to keep customer eyeballs glued to apps for 100% of the day.

The other consideration is that the traffic (and submissions) have grown likely 50x plus but the front page still only has 30 slots, and so the 'needle eye' is a lot smaller.

One could argue that a story that makes it to the front page today is much higher quality than one that did so years before.

You get more for 100 points, just like in economic inflation terms, you get more for a consumer electronic that has stayed roughly the same price but quality and features have increased considerably.

Agree with the 'needle eye' being smaller but

> One could argue that a story that makes it to the front page today is much higher quality

This assumes that quality of content is the driving factor in success on Hn or any social network which isn't the case. Timing, attention grabbing title and an engaging subject are arguably more important.

The front page has definitely gotten worse over time. More people doesn't actually imply better judgement in story quality. The moderators have admitted that their goal is to slow the inevitable decline in the quality of the site that comes with a bigger audience; they have no illusions that the site would somehow manage to break the only replicable rule of the internet, that any site will get worse with a wider audience.

It fluctuates but I think overall it’s been very consistent over time and I joined in 2007. Some of the low points where Bitcoin article spam, and various political issues. But, I still see plenty of of stuff from time to time including a very long tendency for random Wikipedia pages to make the front page.

Edit yep there was one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun

Maybe. Though one should then also account for the likely case that early adopters were more niche and deeper into the content, being part of an early community. When communities grow it attracts all sorts of people which may decrease the quality of content but because there is more a few gems will still occur. Because they would be hidden behind the "crappy" content they need to be given more points to arise the mass. A prime example is Stack Overflow which almost died due to its own fame (for the early adopters).

fyi dang has disclosed traffic details on a semi frequent basis - it is currently at 6m requests a day, up from 4m requests a day in 2018.

https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1371586759578984450

Brilliant work. And it makes me think - we produce tools, that are part of two phase spaces - the idea and the knowledge of how to create it. Firstly I simply would not have thought of it, "like button inflation" is a pretty off the wall concept. On top of which I don't know where to get an HN data feed or how to make a chrome extension etc. Yesterday I was on a call with a collegue and the conversation turned to a useful feature we did not have (internal use) - and 30 minutes after the idea we had coded it up - because we had the knowledge but only lacked the idea till that moment.

Without that knowledge even the best idea moves the process from "yeah let's do it" to "I should schedule some time and make a project plan and ..."

The difference is important somehow. And most of our working lives would be better if we stopped with the project plans and just built useful stuff.

Edit: To try and clarify - exploring a new and uncharted phase space is exploration - it cannot be planned in advance, or driven in a particular direction. Sun-Tzu teaches that Climate, Landscape and doctrine all affect our success as much or more than mission and leadership - so we should stop trying to control and actually find the flow.

I think we search for product-market fit, we do not decide product market fit.

One tool I realise i have been trying to build on and off is a post-hoc reporting tool that makes it look like my exploratory development style was actually planned (it's always something like, I am going to explore this inferring hill over there, and just make sure the roadmap, docs and timesheets are up to date.) This way I don't get people bothering me so much. It works better than grumpy.

Side note:https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/more-or-less-behind-th...

That podcast talks about building recovery medical trial - it is a near perfect example of the "next door in phase space" thing i talk about

>The number of points a story has accumulated on Hacker News is a good indicator for how relevant and overall how good the story is.

Sorta. I think it is also demonstrative how much effort there is or how popular the subject is, but this does not mean it is good. If I could change things, it would be that some stories do not stay on the front page so long. Stories about apple news tend to get a lot of points but I don't think they are the most interesting, at least in my opinion. I think there are too many science stories, from maybe 3 science sources(quanta magazine, nautilus,and one other).

I upvote based on how interesting/valuable I think the discussion will be, not necessarily the quality of the article itself.

I end up having to block a lot of the crap that reaches the front page because it otherwise floods the comments link with low quality bickering when I’m trying to hunt for interesting threads.

I'm looking forward to having an AI that blocks all the "this animal I keep locked up is cute" posts, they do nothing for me; I just don't want to see them.

A Slashdot style -30% of points for posts tagged 'cute' would probably do it too.

What are some examples of crap and how do you go about blocking them?

Obligatory 'I am not OP'

What I want when I open up HN is to see: interesting tools and concepts; productivity ideas (that aren't trying to sell me something); and technology community/industry news.

I tend to avoid:

- anything US-related since it's almost always irrelevant to me and often political (which invites a lot of bad faith discussion);

- most cultural issues being that they are rehashed, never interesting and the comments are usually flooded with people who already have strong opinions (not to mention the stale talking points);

- crypto (a financial exercise disguised as technology);

- anything that tries to gender a profession, activity or concept; and

- anything that tries to partition a profession, activity or concept by gender.

Those last two ring of schoolyard bickering. There are others of course, but these are the main offenders.

As far as 'blocking' them: I scrape the titles and domains and hide threads matching patterns in either of those two fields. I check domains to filter out the more 'mainstream' sources since their tech- and science-related articles are heavily oversimplified (and/or factually incorrect, usually as a result of simplification). If I have time over during a break—and I've exhausted the interesting threads—I'll skim the list of hidden threads in case something fell through the cracks. (That hasn't happened yet.)

The core issues I am trying to solve by hiding these threads are negativity bias and time. Divisive subjects—whether I enter the comments or not—sour my mood. One thread doesn't hurt, but they can add up. Removing them from sight saves on emotional energy, and it saves on the time I spend looking for an interesting new read.

>- anything US-related since it's almost always irrelevant to me and often political (which invites a lot of bad faith discussion);

That's too broad.

>- most cultural issues being that they are rehashed, never interesting and the comments are usually flooded with people who already have strong opinions (not to mention the stale talking points);

a lot of them boil down to local politics and voting mechanics, it really feels inappropriate on HN unless all you want to say is "building housing is illegal", local residents have solve it themselves

>- crypto (a financial exercise disguised as technology)

There are environmental disaster articles coming every single day/week. Just introduce a CO2 tax and be done with it. Talking about a boom and a crash every once in a while is ok however.

>That's too broad.

I should probably specify that I meant the US as a polity. I filter titles that mention (america|united states|usa|u\.s\.) or major officials by name. This has done me well so far, and the stories with farreaching consequences have always reached me via several other trusted channels (i.e. friends, family, colleagues, my feed, etc.).

I agree with the rest of your points.

Thanks for the answer!

> As far as 'blocking' them: I scrape the titles and domains and hide threads matching patterns in either of those two fields.

I'd love to see some examples of domains that you block, and would even more love to see some examples of title patterns that you block.

For domains, I block the presence of:

- 'nytimes', 'theverge', 'theguardian' or 'npr' (politics, pop news and US business);

- 'bbc' for all those reasons and their inaccurate reporting on tech and science for the sake of accessibility;

- 'femfosec' (can we not?); and

- 'krebsonsecurity' (for dramatising and clickbaiting fairly mundane stories).

I'm fortunate enough that I hardly have to deal with FAANG where I live and work, so I also block 'fb.com' and any Google brand TLDs since I have trusted circles that act as a human filter on the interesting parts. I also previously blocked '.dev' because it's unavailable from the networks I'm usually working on, and they were usually vapourware email farms or CV padding.

For titles:

- /sexual|lgbt|pedo|culture war/ (unfortunate combo, I know) hides most US politics;

- /cov(?:id|-2)|corona(?:virus)?/ isn't what I'm interested in;

- /\w+js/ hides the JS (framework|library) of the (week|month);

- /in mice/ to hide the deadend studies.

I've also started filtering titles beginning in /^how\b/, since these are almost always advertisements ('How to do X with $product') or political essays. /$\d{4}$/ also hides links to past articles, since the graverobbers are usually just trying to make a statement by invoking the wisdom of old. The hidden gems make their way to me through other channels.

I use this exact same filter on several other aggregators with similar success, so I don't think it's specifically an HN issue. For example: when applied to entertainment aggregators, I only get the entertainment news I came for. HN is my best place for a general feel of the industry's pulse, it just has some fluff in the way.

Thanks - the specifics are incredibly interesting since I basically have to write the official ones.

Anything very close to current politics are very bad, and tend to be the worst offender when it comes to flooding with low effort comments. If I click “comments” and every two comments I see are low quality bickering, troll accounts, etc. from such a thread it will get hidden. Others have noted American politics are particularly bad, which is true, but additionally some of the most vicious threads have been on Indian political topics.

On the more technical topics, cryptocurrency is generally one of the hot beds right now. Threads on Rust can also can get pretty boring , but I won’t typically block those unless they seem mostly bad, which isn’t always the case.

To be a little more vague in attempt to not trigger any of the discussed issues, there are some more specific topics or words I will avoid and block threads about, because my experience is that even from the most neutral, analytical or intellectual perspective they cannot be discussed without triggering a ton of arguing.

As for how, it’s mostly ad-hoc clicking “hide” when I feel I don’t want to see it anymore. As a side note, it seems “hide” does not fully work for Ask HN threads and I assume Show HN as well (though it’s unlikely I’d be blocking the latter). Unfortunately I’ve also considered recently finding or making an extension to also hide certain users as there are certain accounts I remember by name for engaging in this sort of thing.

Curious if you have a list of topics that uniquely/surprisingly stand out as high or low quality

Anything that's controversial in the current USA political environment attracts a lot of disingenuous arguments.

I also have this hunch that submission timing plays a role, not only on HN but other places where there's some time factor involved in the moderation system, explicitly or implicitly. My guess is you could examine this somehow quantitatively, although it might be a little idiosyncratic to specific locations.

I'm curious how closely this would match overall HN traffic -- if only very loosely, or if almost pixel-for-pixel.

Only @dang could tell us!

(It's not at all obvious to me that as HN has grown more popular, whether the proportion of voting to non-voting users would have changed as well.)

I'd love to see a list of top stories of all time - where the ranking was inflation adjusted!

A list per year works and would be easy to use to gage the inflation if you wanted an all time list.

This is cool, and it would be fun to see top stories by year, and top Show HNs by year.

I posted a Show HN [1] when I was new-ish here, and I didn't realize how unusually successful it had been until I saw we were getting web traffic from a site (now defunct) that listed the top 10 Show HN posts of all time.

I've periodically used the HN search function to see what the top HN posts have been, but with the point inflation it's become difficult to make meaningful comparisons across time.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

The shape of the curve is fascinating. You see exponential growth in the early part, which makes sense, but then it sort of converges to a bumpy linear function. Network effects would suggest power law growth, which linear fits into, but this just seems too linear. Normal currency inflation is usually measured as a percentage per year, which implies exponential growth. What is the current %points change per month, for instance?

Nice and interesting analysis. Thank you for sharing.

I now think HN and Reddit and others should consider inflation by default when you search for top posts of all time for example.

Top contributor lists should probably have a date-based window [option?], so they show scores for the last 12 months, say.

The 500 point karma limit should probably be inflation adjusted as well.

Karma doesn't accumulate linearly. I don't know exactly how it works, but certainly for articles I've posted it's true. It might get 300 points but your karma only increases by 200. I don't know if this non-linearity has changed over time, but it could certainly be used to achieve this effect.

And to be clear for others who are wondering what happens at 500 points, it's a threshold for being able to downvote, not a limit per se.

But then probably it should rather be the points that get assigned that would have to be adjusted rather than the thresholds?

Reason: if I e.g. got 1 point 2 years ago, that point had at that time more value (less users than today) than the 1 point that I might get today? (therefore today I should maybe get just 0.5 points per upvote instead of the 1 point that I got 2 years ago, depending on the difference of active users throughout time)

The other approach of just raising the thresholds would on the other hand impact all my points independently from "when" I got them, which sounds wrong to me.

Many years ago I learnt the difference between less and fewer, and now I can’t read or hear someone saying “less than” when it ‘should be’ ”fewer than”

It’s like Roko’s Basilisk. Or The Game (which I just lost), living rent free in my mind, offering nothing of value, yet immune from bleaching - indeed alcohol if anything heightens it’s power (and causing rambling asides, I think ki should go back to torturing myself with Lithuania’s Eurovision entry)

> now I can’t read or hear someone saying “less than” when it ‘should be’ ”fewer than”

Thank you! I love such corrections. I'll try to keep that in mind :)

> i should go back to torturing myself with Lithuania’s Eurovision entry

Hehe, I have that show running in the background - I was just thinking that the presentation of the songs got more extreme compared to previous years... . Sorry, I overlooked Lithuania.

Edit: saw a few seconds of replay of Lithuania - it seemed okay-ish (better than others).

memetic viruses are real. Infohazards should not be taken lightly.

What has been seen cannot be unseen. However, it's worth taking all that lightly because correcting people's grammar is a suboptimal social strategy.

I think that the downvote mechanism should just be removed and the flag cap moved to 500. It's just become a mechanism to remove controversial topics from conversation. HN used to have some very off-the-wall libertarian voices which incited some interesting conversations. Now everything just gets downvoted into oblivion unless you are Mainstream Approved

Another interesting point as I sit here and watch this comment literally 'fade' into the echo chamber. Why is it that HN signals immediately when comments go below the 1 point threshold, yet hides upvotes? It seems like HN encourages the bandwagon effect on downward pressure only

> I think that the downvote mechanism should just be removed

Why? I think this approach makes an assumption that everyone is upvoting everything that they would not downvote. I upvote things I find interesting or insightful, and I do my part in terms of moderation by downvoting comments that don't have a good fit for HN.

What I see on Facebook and Twitter is that the inability for the hivemind to have some kind of downward pressure mechanism on comments encourages/enables polarizing comments by vocal minorities to rise to the top. I see this frequently in the comments on the posts of local political figures. The top comments shown are almost always controversial and unhelpful/unproductive - things like whataboutism, blatantly racist remarks, etc. Eventually I got tired of constantly catching myself up in arms over FB comments and stopped participating.

The only way I see to counteract this as a rank-and-file user is to upvote/like every single comment except for the ones that are hurting actual discourse. IMO this will drive away people that you ultimately want to be participating on HN.

You have an interesting point, that I think comes from our ill definition of why we have downvotes on HN and why we have flagging. Flagging, from what I can tell is for "a comment that breaks the HN guidelines" or "a story does not belong on HN". It seems like your downvotes for comments that "don't have a good fit for HN." would actually be better moderated by flagging, no?

Flagging blatant racism and other destructive argument tactics is also fair game. So what are we actually downvoting for?

I see flag as something more along the lines of report on Reddit - I assume it raises the flagged comment to the actual moderation team (dang et al) for review & action against the user if necessary. I don't think it's worth flagging someone and risking their account over a bit of self-promotion, punning, one line jokes, or abrasive comments. I see downvotes as my chance to shape the conversation without jumping in to comment and add to the fire.

An example: a common HN trope is to comment something tangentially related to the linked article, but the comment isn't directly related, isn't an attempt to discuss the linked item, and comes off with a "hustle" vibe (check out my project that is similar, check out the company I created that solves the same problem, I wrote an article about this last year go to my website instead) rather than actual discussion about the article. Sometimes these comments come off as extra slimy, but I'm not going to flag someone for trying to get attention, I'm just going to do what I can to shape the conversation by downvoting in cases I judge as egregious.

Good point, and great example. That is a situation which I would downvote too, given the chance. Have you seen the flagging system lobste.rs uses? It's a lot more friendly than HN's black-box flagging (and also the only way to moderate). Everything that doesn't really necessitate being flagged is on the users to ignore and not engage with.

https://lobste.rs/about#flags

I think we agree on the effectiveness of downvoting as a community moderation tool. But, I just cant stand sites that use it. They all eventually turn into an uninteresting echo chamber; it's happening to HN, it happened to Reddit, it happened to Digg. Etc.

I rarely downvote, but when I do it’s almost always for something that seriously detracts from a curious and open-minded discussion or is factually wrong about its main point (not “doesn’t match my opinion” but “provably doesn’t match the facts”).

I flag almost never. I probably vouch about half as often as I downvote.

I think I also downvote/moderate under similar circumstances, though I also fall prey to the exact kind of behavior that I'm calling out (flippant downvoting).

You point out a super important part of forum moderation : trolling and posts which "provably do[n't] match the facts". Aka. Flame-Bait

Downvoting is one way to moderate these posts, but the HN FAQ also mentions this type of behavior (suggesting Flagging as a solution) :

> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Downvoting is a great tool to moderate posts, especially for users who wield the power wisely like a longtime user like yourself. But I don't think the 500 comment threshold is enough to sort out the wheat (you) from the chaff (me).

What's funny, is that HN voting is such a problem, it also dictates in the FAQ to not even complain about it!

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I go on and off with having downvote arrows hidden by default: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165960

Makes for one extra step if I want to downvote.

Hah! I love that, we definitely share this same concern about how our lizard brains affect our actions

Or with uBlock₀ filter:

    news.ycombinator.com##[title='downvote']

Then for showing the downvote button someone can temporarily disable cosmetic filters from the uBlock₀ popup.

I do think the downvote button contributes considerably to shutting down things like pun threads and low effort comedic jabs. It's always sad to see someone who is making a good faith effort to have an interesting conversation get drowned in downvotes, but on the net I think the downvote does more good than harm.

From Dang :

> The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away.

> Flagging of comments is important, too. If you see a comment that breaks the HN guidelines, such as by being uncivil, you should flag it. But there's one extra hoop to jump through in the comment case: you have to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. That's a speed bump to dampen impulsive flagging.

I honestly think the opposite, downvotes are the perfect target for our knee-jerk lizard-brain response to things we don't like. Flagging and reporting are a much more community focused approach to moderation, requiring people to actually think about why they are removing a person from the conversation

I personally think votes should only affect the order of comments. I am interested in reading down voted comments just to avoid the echo chamber effect.

This is great. I was suggesting a similar feature for search HN literally only a couple of weeks ago:

https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/207

Looking forward to using!

> It's basically the average point count of the top 100 stories of each day.

How sensitive are the results to changing 100? Using a smaller number would be more accurate for the top posts.

You could also use an algorithm that uses different calculations based on the popularity of the original post.

It would be interesting to see a 'best' page based on inflation-adjusted scores:

https://news.ycombinator.com/best

That would require indexing the inflation adjusted scores of every post (or at least, every post that has ever made it to the front page, or maybe just every day's #1 if you assume that no day's #2 and below could ever outrank any other day's #1) rather than adjusting the score of posts on the current page, which is more than can reasonably be expected from an extension, so I'm not actually making a feature request... unless you feel like it.

The biggest issue is that stories posted by people with high karma hit the front page even if they're off topic/dupes/garbage, while good new submissions often fail to get much promotion.

Is that actually true?

If yes, instead of boosting all submissions, the user decide the boost, with quadratic karma cost, or similar.

I have noticed the opposite happen on Dwitter.net (a visual creative coding community) - I think it takes more thought, time, and effort to come up with new code tricks (or use existing ones in a new interesting way). Similarly, certain visual motifs have been explored and seen by those who have been on the site for a while. There is still a steady influx of people so I think it is the nature of lower-hanging fruit becoming less impressive to the average dweet enthusiant.

Mapping the current points would be more interesting to me in practice. Right now, when you install the extension and read the frontpage you just see the points doubled, which is pretty useless. But if the extension would pick a fixed date - say 1.1.2020 - and then recomputes the data of older and newer submission with their exact inflation ratio relative to that date, then you would have a stable comparison point also useful for new articles.

Interestingly, the upvotes are quite inconsistent across multiple resubmissions of the same URL. Instead of adjusting against inflation, I think the HN formula itself should be adjusted: HNFormula(age,upvotes)/views. I'm working on a blog post about that, here is my current draft: https://felix.unote.io/hacker-news-scores

This happens on most sites, including reddit, but the opposite happened on stack overflow. I started posting there when I was in uni, but mostly stopped when I got a job.

Yet because the traffic has grown, those comments keep (or kept) accumulating karma. More interesting, because I answered some questions that became highly popular, I get a much larger share of the karma than others who have had to spend more time researching.

Not only this but also the number of votes from users who were active years ago is also a very interesting metric to see. No doubt HN audience has changed over the years and votes from original users are diluted by votes from new comers. It won't be easy to do but one could aggregate "favorites" from all users on a daily basis and only count the votes from users with an old registered date.

FYI: If you read Hacker News via RSS, check out https://hnrss.org/ , which allows you to filter the feed by points/comments.

e.g.

https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=100&comments=25

Would be nice if hnrss filtered by inflation adjusted points… :-)

Pretty soon we will have to start borrowing karma from China and leaving a debt for our children. The only solution is to create a deflationary blockchain based karma solution that makes fewer votes get recorded over time based on increasingly difficult proof of work.

I'd be interested to see a "top of all time by adjusted score" list of posts.

I've always thought something similar should apply to stackoverflow. Points from newer questions should be worth increasingly more, as more and more questions (specially the easy ones) are already answered

Very nice realization of the idea. The extension is a sweet perk.

I was thinking about something like this some time ago. I also wonder how it compares with comment count per post and score/comments ratio in time.

this is a wonderful topic that i have always kinda wondered about informally. a slightly adjacent question ive had is how much does the rank of a post feeback into votes. my assumption is that the higher the ranking, the higher the absolute number of votes the ranking itself (independent from the actual article) generates. coupling some kind of way of compensating for that with your historical inflation adjustment would give you a fairly uniform metric for gauging public reception to submissions i think.

Love the web app, but my browser extension space is so limited I'm not sure I want to add another with such marginal (however interesting!) value. Thank you for posting.

All 1 point show as 2 points. Shouldn't those be 1 point regardless of date since it's the base and it means some specific post had no upvotes?

Seems like it would be interesting to see an inflation-adjusted top 100 stories of all time.

The two dips in 2013 and 2014 are interesting. It's definitely not a straight line up.

I bet you see a lot more comments on average on popular articles as well.

Interesting chart. What happened in April 2012?

But can it predict the next financial crisis?

HN predicted 5,387 of the last two financial crises successfully.

> The extension is available for Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately the extension is only available as a direct download for Chrome because I didn't bother paying Google money to publish this extension. The Firefox extension is available in the official Add-On store.

This is so sad... I knew they required a paid account to submit to google play, didn't realise that applied to the browser extension repo as well. Oh well, just another reason to stay on Firefox :p

It's a single 5$ registration fee per account. Nothing huge.

Once you paid the fee, you can publish as many extensions as you want.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/register/

This is probably a very light anti-spam measure?

It is[1].

[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2010/08/security-improvements-and-...

firefox now requires developers to 'sign' their extension with mozilla, and has disabled the ability to side load extensions manually for more than just temporary use, unless you are using some special developer version of firefox. chromium still allows users to side load their extension. it's ironic that google would allow more freedom to the user than mozilla.

I rarely use Chrome. About once a month to make invoices (Firefox PDF output isn't correct), or rarely for some site that's not working in Firefox or Safari, just Chrome.

Even with that low usage I had to side load an extension recently to add some functionality. Thank goodness it's still possible.

Seems like a good way to prevent a lot of bad actors spamming. Google has a lot of problems with people automating free signups for computing and distribution resources... if you give someone any amount of free computing power, abusers will come.

Maybe that's good to reduce spam submissions.

Oof you have to pay Google to publish extensions (and they still can't manage the spam?) That's some brain damage.

I thought this would be about compensation figures.

It’s about HN points.

I've accumulated a lot of HN points, and at no point did I discover some way to turn that into compensation!

The true karma was the friends we made along the way.

I once saw a comment here that some people put their HN usernames on their resumes.

I was shocked; seems like that is more likely to be taken as a negative signal than a plus. “Here, look how good I am at wasting time on this web forum!” :-)

I'd personally take a CV with a big grain of salt, as I personally wouldn't see value in a high karma due to publishing popular stories.

On the other hand, I wouldn't discard it in principle. The comments history of a user says a lot about the user's ideas and approach to discussions/debates.

HN shaped the way I discuss/debate more than anything else in my life, so there can be a significant value in it.

I've been approached (though rarely) because of HN activity, and I've also found great temporary work via HN occasionally. So I would say it's a net positive, and I include it in my LinkedIn profile.

I use a résumé/CV sometimes, but I have found that those places which require one take a long time to process applications and enquiries compared with those places that don't require one, with the result that the latter places have ended up hiring me while the former places are still working up to their third interview or whatever.

In the end the résumé/CV is good to keep going as a hedge, and multiple applications are good for peace of mind, but (maybe it's just by chance) it hasn't ended up used by places I ended up working for for some years now.

I figure having a searchable track record is one of the reasons it's working out that way, and HN is part of that. Other public locations similarly, such as dev mailing lists, issue comments, etc. It's not why I write here, but it is a motivation to write thoughtfully while keeping it real, and I am mindful that a future employer may read what I write :)

It depends what that user did; a really really good account could be more problem-solving than time-wasting.

I think for some low information recruiter/companies it would seem valuable; here's my stackoverflow account (top 33%), my github account (something or other notable), my HN account (big points) results in recruiter thinking oooh big nerd, big in nerd community, yes push this guy.

I mean this of course all plays into the assumption that hiring is anyway a big circus where nobody actually knows anything and are just guessing. But I do seem to see a lot of that assumption being made.

I get paid interest on stackoverflow: I have gone up in rank without doing anything. I was top 10% a few years ago when I stopped, and I am now top 8% (without doing any work at all!).

right they changed their algorithm last year (maybe two years ago now actually). I noticed I got a bump from it, it's interesting to me because I've never really done anything (asked some interesting questions, edited a couple things that were out of date, I have probably answered no more than 3 questions that were not asked by myself.) yet even so I am better than 50%, pretty crazy.

It's more likely the negative reputation this forum has would taint you by association.

It's not quite compensation per se, but rsync.net will give you a very nice discount just for being a HN user. (I don't think they check how many points you have accumulated though.)

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