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Comment by q_revert | Hacker News Reader

what might also be interesting is to see how karma is accrued.. from a huge number of submissions, or from a large number of insightful comments, or what the breakdown is..

for example, i've made two submissions, both making it to the #1 spot, and have been afraid to submit any more lest my streak be ended

some measure of quality over quantity would be nice :)

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About half my highest-karma comments have been pithy dismissals, humorous asides, planting flags on hot-button nontechnical posts, etc. -- insubstantial stuff.

14 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5646078

6 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633037

I'm not saying karma is worthless, but high-karma comments are skewed by jackpots obtained from fluff.

I wonder how much of the karma for the insubstantial stuff is actually a response to not being able to down vote.

When you can't down vote, seeing a reply that sheds new light, puts some of the ridiculousness in context, or just takes a person down a notch may get a vote because it's your best way of voting by proxy.

For the comment writer it's a bit of a double edged sword. Sometimes the feedback you get relative to the time and effort put into a post can be disheartening.

Unfortunately, Comment Karma is not available publically. (Unless you tried to do Total Karma - Karma from submitted Links)

Why doesn't HN distinguish between Link Karma and Comment Karma a la Reddit anyways?

I think he means more "Total Comment Karma / Total Comments", to see if the top users get, say, 3 karma per comment, but average 20+ comments/day. Or if they post relatively few comments, but really high-quality ones.

I am not very interested in karma, and part of the reason is that there is no distinction between comment karma and submission karma. I don't think that being the first to submit an interesting link should be comparable to being the first person to submit an interesting comment. But that's because I come here for the discussions. I imagine that people who come here for new links and never browse the discussions feel differently.

This is something that it would be interesting for these guys to separate out. There are clearly a number of accounts which just submit everything from various 'known to hit' blogs/sites, there are some that submit what ever was a high scoring article a year ago, Etc etc.

What I find amusing is that since they are essentially playing a game "karma scoring for fun" they complain about it when someone else's submission of the same story gets more karma than they got.

That said the use of a mechanism like karma points to drive user engagement and participation is pretty classic. You could ask someone to spend hours day scouring the internet for interesting stories but they would want you to pay them. Offer up karma points to the people who find the cool stories and suddenly they are competing for free to populate the news feed for your site.

You can see comment karma, but only after about a week, using the search box at the bottom of the page.

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=tptacek&s...

Just noticed this the other day - is it an estimation?

I'm not sure but apparently a user's total karma is not exact, according to a comment pg made a while back.

Because HN is written in ARC which is somewhat tedious and not well known except by people like PG who don't have time to fix HN.

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