Ask YC: Redo the Leaderboard | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Redo the Leaderboard

5 pointsmajimojo21 comments

It never resets. So its utterly meaningless when we're trying to catch the charismatic people with 7000 points.

The point system should encourage participation. If we reset the point system every quarter (3 months) or every YC funding cycle, and then give permanent awards to the leaders, then all of us, leaders or laggards, have more reason to participate positively.

Or, instead of awards, we can tack permanent bonus points onto each user. #1 place gets +20 bonus points. Starts the next season with an automatic advantage (like racee qualifiers).

nickb (100+53) 100 is permanant.. 53 is current quarter.. total 153

Keep things fresh.

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I'm planning multiple lists ranked by different criteria. For now it will be off the Lists link at the bottom of the page.

The problem is not as urgent as you might think, though. In a site that's growing, you get a de facto karma decay, because a top submission gets more points than it would have 6 months ago.

How about just using the same gravity algorithm to rank people as is used to rank stories. I like keeping absolute points because each point represents a human's input.

I think people put too much importance on karma. Personally, I don't really care. I check my RSS feeds 3 times a day (when I have breaks) and I post stuff I find interesting. It literally takes a second to contribute to n.yc (hint: look into bookmarklet link) so why not help a site that I like? So yes, I've accumulated a lot of points. I haven't checked the score in weeks but I assume I'm still in the lead but if pg reset my points, I wouldn't mind at all.

I think people think that pg will look at your YC application differently if you have a high karma on the site. I have no idea if that's true (never applied) but some people have said that they had high karma and didn't get accepted. So YMMV.

I'd worry more about my app, idea, biz plan than to worry about karma when applying. I doubt pg will accept you just because you contribute to n.yc.

does anyone ever want to click on the leaders link on top? its pretty static. most of us follow your example nick, we contribute cause its fun and interesting. thanks man!

this post had nothing to do with getting into YC funding, the funding cycle reset idea was simply a suggestion of adequate time to reset.

for the record, i am not applying to YC next cycle or any other cycle. just wanted to help the site.

I agree... I don't think it's a very important aspect of the site and wouldn't care if it went away. I have my own mental 'leader board' of people who post things I like anyway.

Karma Decay Function

Everyday everyone's karma gets multiplied by n where 0<n<1. (0.9 seems good)

I was gonna suggest something like this. Or apply a similar ranking function to the leaderboards as you do the the articles.

"The point system should encourage participation. If we reset the point system every quarter (3 months) or every YC funding cycle, and then give permanent awards to the leaders, then all of us, leaders or laggards, have more reason to participate positively."

Just to add a different voice to the matter, I don't subscribe by this philosophy. I don't care about my karma points and its existence doesn't affect my motivation to participate. I upvote in appreciation, and post to share. It's the crowd, and the crowd's ideas, that matter. I don't use the leaderboard at all, and in that sense, it is "utterly meaningless" to me whether it disappears or not.

I support this idea. I'll make my comeback yet.

Perhaps soon I will release my karmaBot (tm), it subscribes to the rss feeds of programming.reddit.com, techcrunch, and xkcd, and auto reposts all stories to news.yc

We will soon takeover the world! ! !! ! muahahahahaha

Had the same idea, but mine on PG's articles, too.

I think the problem is the karma score conflates submitting articles and posting comments. I think the two should be separate.

I'd also like to see a weighted score something like (karma from posts) / (1+log10(total number of words in posts)).

I agree, not sure how easy it would be and if it would upset the people at the top.

If they receive permanent awards. They get recognition AND they get motivation the next season to say interesting things.

fair enough, I have worked hard for my massive 96 score and if I lost it I would be a little sad :p

good point. i only have 70pts so i feel for this.

maybe the total accumulated points of all time are also kept. YC doesn't erase any data. its just writing a new database query.

old query: Points = "select count(votes) where user.id = 123"

new method: "select votes, date where user.id = 123" and do some heuristic magic in the model or results datastructure.

or they could just keep it and add this months top users etc and we are all happy :P

what's the point of this voting stuff ?

Kierkegaard did his studies more than 150 years ago, maybe it's time to use his findings in our life.

Care to elaborate on what you are talking about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

He discovered numerous aspects of crowd thinking, one is that they are generally less smart than individuals. Groups of people tends to act in the same way (conformation).

That's why the voting thing on websites doesn't work: leaders becomes unchallengeable.

(I'm not arguing against democracy, where lists are closed before each election, election are a discreet events etc.)

Moreover, what is the aim of collecting votes on this websites? If people vote or bury one of my comments, what does it means about my future or past comments? It is only a conformity problem.

You raise an interesting point, since most of what circulates about crowd wisdom these days is the Surowiecki book citing Galton's study. What you mention here is more like the Spiral of Silence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

I don't think voting in its current form is good. I am much more fond of a prediction market-esque, or virtual economy (the specific term eludes me at the moment) implementation. Nevertheless, here is a possible way to answer your question about the aim.

A hypothetical case would be, users upvote in appreciation (or to bookmark), with the side effect that more appreciated items float higher, and receive greater visibility, acting as a filter. The catch is that it's to the benefit of other users.

To that, I'm not entirely sure why it works (as in, why it became popular). I don't click arrows much. I clicked yours because I appreciate your reply, 3 days after :-)

Which shows another glaring problem. Current voting mechanisms let these votes go stale. I'm upvoting on something 7+ days old. You will receive a point but not know the context of it. Anyhow, that's another topic.

Thanks again, for following up. Don't agree entirely, but a good point nonetheless.

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