Ask PG: Leader board ranked my comment karma | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Leader board ranked my comment karma

10 pointskyro11 comments

I think comment karma is a much more accurate way of representing the quality of contributions a particular user makes. And I don't think factoring in submission karma really adds any significant value to assessing that quality. A lot more thought is put into sparking interesting conversation than submitting an interesting article, but often times, the karma doesn't quite reflect that, as submissions can get voted up to relatively high amounts, making any comment karma gain seem insignificant, and recognizing/rewarding users inaccurately.

So, an alternate leader board would be appreciated.

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I recently wrote something that displays a list of the users with the top average comment scores. I could make that visible.

http://top.searchyc.com/points_per_comment

Your list may be better if it is bigger or if it lists only the users who have made more than a certain number of comments.

Great site: http://top.searchyc.com/

Can you allow us to edit our old posts?

If not, can you delete my account?

i tend to agree, but i'm probably biased. i submit maybe one thing every two months -- all my karma is from comments. i'd love to see what a leaderboard looks like without submission karma. and a leaderboard of just submission karma.

To the extent that karma is an incentive at all, I'd rather have it encourage more high-quality submissions than more high-quality comments. (I'm reasonably happy with the level of discussion in the comments, but there aren't as many interesting submissions as I want.)

I would guess that the supply of high-quality submissions is fairly inelastic compared to the supply of high-quality comments; i.e., there are enough people submitting articles that the good ones will likely get submitted either way, while the same may not be true for comments.

I agree that the karma points derived from article posting is essentially a lot of nonsense. I remember once finding an article on slashdot in the middle of the night about java being rumored to be open sourced before it actually happened. I quickly posted it to reddit since I had not already seen the article there, and within the next day I obtained about 80 karma points from posting that one article. The news article would have ended up on reddit regardless of if I posted it, but because I was lucky enough to see the article first among reddit readers, I got a lot of karma points.

I doubt that anyone has ever gotten 80 karma points from writing a single comment, but it is difficult to use comments alone as a ranking system since there are a lot of people who just read articles and will ignore any additional commentary.

I am not sure why anyone thinks this is important. You can't turn karma points into investments in your start-up - it's just stuff.

I agree in theory, but in reality it would probably be divisive and not worth it. I think it's better just to accept having a lower place on the leader board than you would have otherwise.

(And also, users who self-submit their own blog posts do deserve the karma.)

Oh, this isn't about my place on the leader board. Admittedly, most of my points have come from submissions, so I'd have a pretty low spot on the list.

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