The leader board now shows average karma. | Hacker News Reader

The leader board now shows average karma.

8 pointsjacquesm21 comments

But there is one potential drawback, answering 'Ask HN' style posts is a fantastic way to destroy your average, this may lead to people answering those less because they might be afraid of denting their 'average' karma.

View on HN

Not just Ask HN questions but people will think thrice before commenting on anything and everything. The quality of comments on HN is pretty good as it is. I think this is a bad idea. Sometimes not showing something can be a good thing.

I agree revert back!

I actually think this will help comment quality improve. You can definitely see the difference in the quality of comments on HN from a year ago to today.

Just take a look on some articles on searchyc.com.

I'm not saying that the quality today is any worse than the quality a year ago (it's very difficult to judge that metric), just the submissions and comments are different, which is to be expected of a growing community.

but people will think thrice before commenting on anything and everything.

I'd say that is a good thing. Since coming here I have started to carefully consider posting each and every time.

I like to think my post quality has gone up because of it!

(also, the majority of commentors are not on the leader board so this effects only a minority)

Hm, we're up to Karma Average. Soon we will be tracking Karma Assists and Total Karma Created.

But it is only when Nate Silver unveils PEKOTA that we will finally know the ONE TRUE SCALE on which greatness is measured. [1]

[1] Poster Empirical Karma and Optimization Test Algorithm

Total karma created would be a really good metric.

Come to think of it, it might.

I presume "total karma created" is all of your karma, plus all of the karma accumulated by other comments that are in response to your comments and submissions?

Wait, don't tell me... searchyc already has a page for this, right?

I'd also love to see that stat broken down by link destination instead of by submitter. My money is on Techcrunch, though 37signals might do well in the PACK rankings. [1]

---

[1] Per-post Average Creation of Karma

What's a karma assist ?

This must be how Douglas Adams felt when people would come up to him and ask why he'd chosen "forty-two".

Okay, let me see what I can do with this one. You score one karma assist when a given user upvotes your comment immediately before or after upvoting a comment higher up on the same branch. The idea is that you can help other comments rise in prominence by adding your comment to them, thereby increasing their value. Thus, if someone upvotes your comment above and upvotes this comment at the same time, I get a Karma Assist.

Naturally, you can't Assist your own comment, because everyone knows that's a sin.

But I worry that this definition still isn't arbitrary enough. You actually might be able to compute this with an algorithm, which ruins the humor value. If the jokey analogy to NBA assists is going to hold up, Karma Assists need to be both poorly defined and arbitrated by bored human minions with a serious conflict of interest:

http://deadspin.com/5345287/the-confessions-of-an-nba-scorek...

42 was obvious ;)

When I look up the averages of my favorite posters, some are near two and others are near ten. I don't really see a pattern here, but maybe others have figured out a productive way to use this information?

It's the average comment score. It doesn't include submissions.

I meant the answers to Ask HN style postings, not the actual postings themselves.

It seems something might be buggy. Mine has been going down since new feature was posted (as I recall it was 5.71 a couple days ago, now 5.35) though my average is well above that during that time.

It looks at the last n comments, so when a high scoring comment passes outside that window, your average will go down.

This only matters if you care what your average karma over some arbitrary number of previous posts is. Every once in awhile when I go on a long run of posts with low/negative karma, I'll check searchyc.com --- which doesn't have the same limitations as news.yc. You can safely ignore the HN leaderboard.

It'd be cool if you could sort by average karma. You'd obviously need some way to compensate for users with only a handful of comments that happened to be highly voted up, but this would still be nice to see.

http://top.searchyc.com/

i'm not seeing how answering 'ask hn' posts would have any particular effect on your karma. if you have a good answer, it will get voted up, same as normal. is there something i'm missing?

Ask HN posts scroll off the page usually with just the one answer and 0 upvotes. If the answer is 'to the point' then it's dealt with, so it needs no further votes.

my heart missed a beat as I checked to make sure I was still on it.

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