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Comment by polyfractal | Hacker News Reader

If you write quality comments, karma begets more karma because you'll sort higher on the page. For example, Patio11 usually writes helpful posts, and because of his obscene karma, he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.

But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore. At least, I've pretty much stopped looking at my karma score.

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Are you certain that a user's karma factors into comment sorting? It's clear that more recent comments will be sorted to the top (temporarily), but I definitely haven't gotten the impression that existing karma scores affect anything. I don't know the factors of the real algorithm.

Edit: This could be related (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), comments are allowed some time at the top before they "mature."

  (let mature (table)
      (def delayed (i)
          (and (no (mature i!id))
              (acomment i)
              (or (< (item-age i) (min max-delay* (uvar i!by delay)))
                  (do (set (mature i!id))
                      nil)))))

From what I've observed, the greatest factor in post ranking (besides upvotes on the post in question, obviously) is your karma average per post, not your total.

Also, PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.

I don't quite get what the average karma rating is...is it simply karma-per-post? Because I've seen it jump up and down (on my own account) no matter what I've posted or how little of new karma I may have gotten.

I think it's something like the average of the last 50 to last 5 comments you've made. Maybe with some outliers removed as well.

The main point is that it's not instant (i.e. your last comments are not taken into account) and it uses only recent comments, rather than over the life of your account.

And it ignores outliers [at least on the high side].

I do not see any use of the user's karma in the sorting algorithm for comments in the published HN code.

As I mentioned above: PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.

  >> he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.

Patio11 gets high karma for his comments because he consistently posts insightful comments and people (myself included) search out what he had to say: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11

Sure, I said as much in my post. He writes great comments which are very helpful. Which means they always get karma. But if there is a sorting of "high karma users" to the top...it simply accelerates how quickly he get's more karma.

Patio is one of my favorite posters, I'm not denigrating him at all. He certainly deserves all the karma he gets.

As others have said, I don't believe your existing karma influences the weight of your new comments.

However, I would think that patio11's, edw519's and others' reputation attract karma more easily than the "regular" commenters. I mean that people are more easily convinced by whatever they say because they trust their reputation.

Whenever I see patio11 posting on any submission he is always the top rated comment, often when his comment (nice though it is) is fairly offtopic.

I look at my karma score mostly to notice that it changed, which moves me to look at my previous comments to see what got upvoted/downvoted and what got responded to. I kinda wish I had a feed or something for upvote/downvote/comment, but it hasn't been important enough for me to go looking for one.

> But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore.

Why did you care in the first place?

With very few points you don't have certain privileges on the site (downvoting, reporting) and you can get hellbanned for an unpopular comment.

The ability to down vote and change the title bar are lined to karma.

Besides the tangible benefits others have mentioned, I think everyone falls prey to the desire to be "well liked". Karma means you wrote something other people liked or appreciated, so it is gratifying to watch your karma go up (because that means people like what you are saying).

Silly I know, but I also recognize that it is what made me try to write good comments when I first joined HN. Which is exactly what karma should do - make you try to be a better poster.

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