Comment by mysterypie
7 hours ago
There's something about the numbers I can't figure out. Look at the top three HN contributors by karma[1]:
username words karma
1. tptacek 4,310,896 416351
2. jacquesm 3,841,209 237961
3. ingve 2,273 215283
How did ingve get to #3 with just 2 thousand words, whereas tptacek and jacquesm authored 3-4 million words? Looking at his 14-year history, it's true that he hasn't written that much. I suppose one possibility is that his writing is 1000x better at earning karma. But I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the quality of his 3-4 submissions per day that brings up his karma when one of his submissions is a hit (I think that submissions do count toward karma).
I think many folks get a majority of their karma from submissions (you can get a lot from popular stories). I believe that some people are quite good at anticipating which submissions will be productive (which is also something that LLMs should do well).
Most of mine is from comments. I’m too lazy to spend time, curating submissions.
Could it be that ingve has submitted a lot of links, but has not made that many comments?
I believe Karma solely comes from upvotes for comments minus downvotes. Submissions don't count.
That might be in real life ("afk"), but on HN even submissions give you karma.
Have a look at your submissions, they brought you karma. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032>
Globally, karma comes from submissions and writing comments.
4 minutes later ...
I don't know why you got ingve, their global rank is now 79469 / 774235
I was looking at rank by karma (not rank by word count):
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Sorry for my confusion.
On average (as of last 6 months, didn't check further), he has roundly been submitting 100 links per month.