Comment by pjc50
6 hours ago
#33 here. I have written .. a lot of words. I don't know whether they're correctly excluding ">" quoted words though.
A quirky feature of HN is that you can only see detailed karma counts for your own posts. One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary.
I tried to do exactly this, but you need to hit the actual HTML news.ycombinator.com site, since karma is not visible through the API or in any of the public data dumps. And HN appears to have rather robust anti-scraping provisions. Even after trying a few different back-off strategies, my scraper was rate limited quickly, so I gave up.
Karma depends entirely on when you comment: My most upvoted comments are the early ones. I check HN perhaps once a day, so my comments don't always get a lot of visibility. Perhaps it's better that way.
I mean, no, karma depends entirely on the contents of your comment :P I've have comments go from 0 to -4 to 50 to 10 over the course of one day, probably I'd say the flunctionations depends more on how controversial ("hot take") your comment is, but if it's generally good, it tends to be upvoted while more emotional/nonsense appeals tend to be downvoted. Pretty much as expected :)
Being late to a post though does you no favors. People have moved on. So it's both.
Hot takes? Aside: an example of a "third rail" post (where I seem to get the most downvotes) appears to be when I disparage UBI. I used to get hated for disparaging self-driving cars too but people beat me up less about that these days.
> One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary
Seems simple enough, while searching I came across this snippet you can paste in the console, and gives you a sorted list of most upvoted/downvoted comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107028
Sadly requires hitting news.ycombinator.com rather than the API, but only way to get the actual points as you mention.