Comment by keiferski
11 hours ago
Yeah, I started to think out what you'd need to actually get a "succinct but high-quality" score and it gets complex, fast. Karma will be bloated by popular hot takes and submissions, for starters. Then you have to determine the certain cut-offs to ensure that someone with 10 comments of 10 words each (with 100+ karma each) isn't "the most succinct."
I'm less interested in the idea as a ranking, and more as a way to evaluate my own writing, with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible.
> with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible
You're assuming "high karma = high quality" which, isn't always correct :) I've had wildly incorrect claims be upvoted a lot, and correct ones downvoted, seems to be more about what the subject is about and what "side you're coming from" rather than anything else sometimes. Other times it goes exactly as expected.
End effect is, I wouldn't rely on karma as a signal for quality, just "agreement at large" or something.
I don't think it's public (it might not even be saved) but something akin to Reddit's "controversial" would be interesting as well. I've seen my comments go from double-digit positive to double-digit negative, and vice versa, in contentious threads on divisive topics. It'd be interesting to see who has the most votes regardless of +/- but the lowest total karma. Who amongst us is just pissing off everyone?
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=proven
Here's the Query that I ran on play.clickhouse.com (Please note that both the queries that I am about to give are AI generated)
SELECT id, argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma FROM hackernews_changes_profiles GROUP BY id ORDER BY current_karma ASC LIMIT 5
№ id current_karma1 1 Proven -247
2 VentureHawk -89
3 adamyormark -50
4 oldpersonintx2 -45
5 sevenstar -35
So proven has the lowest karma.
While at it, Here's the query for the most upvoted (karma) people on hackernews
SELECT id, argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma FROM hackernews_changes_profiles GROUP BY id ORDER BY current_karma DESC LIMIT 5
id current_karma 1 tptacek 414947
2 jacquesm 235042
3 ingve 214146
4 todsacerdoti 204814
5 rbanffy 184030
I remember tptacek because he is the second person of all the people (behind dragonwriter) and he has written 14.37 Volumes worth of game of thrones.
Hope this helps. I just ran the query because I was curious to find the results :D
I can add this query to the website, but one of my worries (even with this post) is that people might try to now benchmark it which wasn't my intention & it will fail to be a good measure (someone mentioned the goodhart's law which is correct/apt here)
No, I mentioned in the grandparent comment:
> Although karma points are not equivalent to quality,
But I don't think they are totally uncorrelated to quality, either. So you'd need a way to factor karma points in without over-valuing them.
To really get specific, the only thing we're really measuring here is something like, well-written, succinct comments that are appreciated by HN users that are able to upvote. Which is not exactly super useful or insightful, but is a fun exercise.
I always wondered about metrics to measure things like: does the commenter generate positive discussion, flame wars, or plain old dead threads?