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Comment by pjc50

3 days ago

I have 104872 karma on HN. You may find https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments interesting. However, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to sort one's own comments by ranking. One of these days I'm going to scrape mine and see if I can write the "rules of HN" for highly upvoted comments.

One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.

Hmm, I went looking for a comment [0] I made "sometime last year" talking about what does/doesn't get upvoted on HN, I finally found it, I made the comment 9 years ago (I literally stared at the date for a good few minutes, I thought it was much more recent) where I did a short analysis on my own comments over the previous 2 years (at that time) which sort of shows the opposite of what I've said (reviewing the comments I linked), only a few of them were short/snarky/pithy, most were not novels but were a little more fleshed out.

That said, I haven't done sentiment analysis on those or more recent comments but my guess is that "negative" comments get more upvotes

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13491266

> One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.

Informative content gives people social license to approve of the comment. HN users intuit on some level that jokes are against the cultural norms; but being serious all the time in an open round-table environment almost goes against human nature.

I thought I had read you had 1048576 of karma and thought: what a coincidence: 1 megabyte worth of karma.

BTW, this comment is supposed to be joke-ish.