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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

While on the subject of HN comments, I have a request: could the "avg" score for a user be readdressed?

The avg score is the average amount of points from the previous X comments a user has made. However, this disincentivizes user from posting in new threads which are unlikely to receive upvotes. I've lessened my own commenting in new threads because of this.

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I'm surprised that you would consciously not post comments to keep your average score up. The goal here is not the score; the goal is civil and interesting discussion. Comment scores are a means to achieve that goal.

Anytime there is a proxy metric, quirky incentives will crop up. (Such as lines-of-code as a metric of productivity; time spent in office as metric of work commitment; comment average score as metric of contribution to civil and interesting discussion.) My hope would be that when possible, people would realize that the metric used is not the real goal, and make conscious choices which get us closer to the real goal, but are irrational if we only value the metric itself.

I will also point out that your username was not lost on me.

It is relevant, however, if the avg metric is being used for the new HN algorithms.

None of our recent changes consider avg. I personally never look at it and forgot it was even a thing.

That's very good to hear! :)

That's enough to encourage a change to my commenting habits, anyways.

Does the average comment score still have some effect on placement among siblings within a thread? I had noticed that in the past.

Avg is very important, i had an account a few years ago that was a few years old. I made one to many "bad" comments without thinking, and I got shadow banned.

I suspect that your average score had nothing to do with the action taken against you. Rather, it was the accumulation of a certain number of "bad" comments. I also suspect that there was a human-in-the-loop.

Your point is well taken. It is up to each user to decide whether or not this is a disincentive to commenting in a particular thread.

I use fluctuations in my comment karma average as a reality check on how I am doing recently in making constructive, helpful comments. But I burn average karma sometimes in

a) mentioning duplicate submissions (this kind of comment rarely gets an upvote, although I try to upvote most of Colin Wright's comments of the same kind)

b) answering direct follow-up questions someone asks me (which often aren't even upvoted by the person who asked the question).

You can tell I care (at least a little) by the examples I'm providing here, but I try not to worry about it too much. The single best thing to do for average comment karma score (for whatever that's worth) appears to be to make consistently good comments.

To not discourage commenting in low-view threads, should we divide each comment's score by the number of views of the thread? Or probably by some nonlinear function that estimates comment voting activity as a function of views.

My gut feeling is that my average karma at any given moment has far less influence on the rate at which I accumulate karma than the quality of what I write, where I write it, and how I edit it.

It's not that I think page placement doesn't have an effect, it's that writing a ten point comment when my average was two still tended earn ten points. Likewise my three point comments when my average is four tend to earn three points.

That said, the habit of deleting my more or less useless comments is a practice that became more permanent at a time when I was attempting to stay above four. But the idea that I was not helping people because I was worried about average internet points, became too strange...my worrying about accumulating internet points turned out to be absurd enough for me. So that's the absurdity I stick with.

Anyway, I understand where you are coming from and I suspect that you'll let yourself fully enjoy HN again.

I used to worry about that as well, but then I found when I tried to make comments really meaningful and useful, I couldn't quite get them just right.

Now I view comments as a means of continuous practice, so even if there's no recognition by means of votes, I'm still improving my ability to contribute positively.

You are looking at it the wrong way. You should comment when you feel the need to add value to the discussion. In fact, the more good/meaningful comments you post, the more chance you have to get upvoted and actually increase you average over time.

The amount of upvotes a comment earns is a function of how many upvotes the parent submission receives. (Makes sense: the more upvotes the parent receives, the more people will see your comment)

Often I see threads in new submissions which ask for quick feedback to a startup idea or blog post. They would never get upvotes enough to hit the front page normally, and so I would rarely get more than 1-2 upvotes for them.

I used to do that, but my clear impression was that pandering to Silicon Valley trope was a more consistent way to have votes. I repeatedly got bad scores when pointing at problematic misuses of statistics, and unhelpful US-centric focus. I hesitated to keep on, but I stopped both when I learned my score affected my ability to contribute.

In my experience, this is a semi-truthful account of how karma on HN is awarded.

I say semi-true in the sense that it's not wholly inaccurate. Valuable and thoughtful posts are rewarded and up-voted.

However, if my goal were to game the system for maximum karma per unit of time & post, I would contribute comments to hot-button issues that were in line with the prevailing mentality.

This is not to be facetious at all. I'm sure the moderators are well aware of this, but it's quite astounding how many up-votes are thrown around in discussions on polarizing topics (e.g. gender issues, NSA surveillance, etc.).

In my experience, up/down votes correlate more closely to agreement/disagreement than to whether they are good or meaningful. Knowing the audience of HN is often more important than adding to the discussion. That doesn't mean that good or meaningful comments are useless. But if you do present a good and meaningful argument that goes against the majority, you will often be silenced. This frequently results in that person deleting their comment as the downvotes accumulate. I'm not sure how this is accounted for in the statistics of the site.

It also appears to be a trimmed mean, removing outliers. That one amazing comment I made didn't seem to matter at all!

I agree, it would be nice to address this, although I have a feeling I really shouldn't care.

posted elsewhere in this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606784

re: deleted comments should still count toward karma

>The other day I saw a user making comments that struck me as factually questionable. I'm not an expert in that field, so I asked for an explanation. The user had an avg over 5, so there was reason to believe the user might have known something I didn't. All of a sudden, the user's comments on that topic started getting downvoted. Despite the initial downvotes one of the comments was still at the top of the thread (my understanding is that a user's avg impacts the comment ordering). The user never responded to requests for more information or reputable sources, and then all of a sudden, all of his/her comments on that thread were deleted.

>Curious, I went and looked up the user's previous comments. In multiple fields this person put on an air of expertise. Maybe he/she is and then again, maybe not. But the comments were almost all disparaging, with this air of expertise. So, the user makes definitive claims that come across like an expert, if their comments start getting downvoted, they delete the comment and don't get penalized. Otherwise, they reap in the upvotes and have an avg that appears to the world to justify their expertise.

Great username/post combo there

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