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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

The karma analysis completely ignores (after mentioning it) the karma gained from comments. I post almost no stories to HN, but have a karma of over 18k. Any sane, full analysis of HN culture needs to take this sort of thing into account.

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I think of it as the easy way and the hard way to gain karma, but I'm biased as a "commenter" user. In reality, some people work hard to supply HN with interesting stories and that's important, but it's pretty easy to have sizeable karma without really ever engaging in conversation.

I think the tradeoff there is that the HN submitter crowd are very fast to the draw. I'll often encounter a story elsewhere that I want to hear from HN about, so I'll do a search and find it was submitted 15 minutes ago, or even days ago (and I wonder what RSS fueled craze people must go through to find and post things so fast). Of course, for me those are the best cases, because I can go through and read what people think and reply without having to wait for the uptick. But no karma for the slow.

LOL! No RSS, no nothing for me. For me, it is just consistency at a specific timeslot -- wind-down evening for me (Europe's in Office, West Coast wakes up). I tend to fire and forget. I think the hit is less than 5%, but the consistency pays off in the long run. The best I remember is that 4 of my submissions were on the front page over a couple of hours, which is 13.33% of the front page stories.

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I do agree with your point, but unfortunately I was limited by what is available from the APIs: the upvotes for the comments were not provided. I couldn't find a proxy for it either. Thus, I couldn't include it in the analysis

You can build an analysis based on partial ordering. The Axios API gives you relative ranking of comments on a given level. Based on partial order you can build lattices and make assertions but that is really difficult and the juice probably isn't worth the squeeze.

I thought about it, and you might be right that a proxy for the comments upvotes can be established here. But I just couldn't come up with anything satisfying tbh. Besides, with comments, there are replies, replies to the replies, ...etc.

Yes, this is the observation -- comments (when they are meaningful and upvoted) accelerate one's karma. This is also hard, consumes much of your core time, and is more challenging to deal with hyperboles.

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