Comment by simonsarris
13 years ago
Good god this was funny, right down to the usernames.
But now its time to be very HN about it.
> Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat.
Actually I think I have a solution to this, though its just guesswork.
I'm not particularly well known here (or anywhere), but either people actually like the words I say, or I simply have yet to make a complete ass out of myself. (I think one of these is more plausible, but who is to say.)
My average karma on HN is 20.59, which seems to be a lot. Specifically, on the Leaderboard[1] that puts me in fourth place among the HN big names for average karma (though I have nowhere near the total karma to appear there).
I've noticed that when I reply to a post, even if there's already 30 comments, my post usually ends up at the top. And it stays there, even if no one replies, and even if I don't get many or any upvotes for it, for a few hours sometimes.
Alas I don't know for certain, but my guess is that if you have a high average karma then your posts are automatically weighted higher, so you can inject your opinion into almost any topic at any time. This affords me the luxury of being a contradictory whine even if I come late to the party!
Can anyone confirm or deny my suspicion here?
> Alas I don't know for certain, but my guess is that if you have a high average karma then your posts are automatically weighted higher, so you can inject your opinion into almost any topic at any time. This affords me the luxury of being a contradictory whine even if I come late to the party!
One thing I dislike about the 'average karma' is that it discourages engaging in an extended discussion. For example, if you reply to this post, you may get a number of upvotes, but probably not as many as your original post. This creates an incentive just to ignore replies (when possible) so as not to bring down your average comment score.
It matters in high performance Python.
Just sort the comments randomly, as long as their karma is >=0, and place the negative-karma comments at the bottom.
Done. :P
This algorithmic craze is too clever for its own good. It is particularly evident in the false-positive bans.
(And I swear, it's scary how HN joke comments are indistinguishable from the real ones.)
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I have stuff to say about JIT.
Absolutely, if you care about those numbers. I think my average karma is pretty low, but that's not why I'm here.
Well, no, right now average score is meaningless. But if having a higher average score means that you have a stronger voice, as OP suggested, then people will start to care about those numbers.
I assume the goal is to encourage high-quality discussions (including extended discussions/back-and-forth), in which case average comment score will work against that.
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The metric which would be a tad closer to ideal would be some average of u/t where u := the number of users who upvoted a given comment, t := total number of users who saw that comment. Where "saw" can mean either "the comment was already there when the user loaded the comments page", or, if you want to get fancy, "the comment was within the browser's viewport long enough to be read" (which some clever JavaScript can tell you.)
You are also forgetting your groupies. People will upvote your post because its you and not due to its content. tptacek has mentioned this in the past, and I personally suffer from it.
> also forgetting your groupies. ... tptacek has mentioned
I never would have guessed.
I wonder if this thread could be turned into a parody of the parody?
It already has.
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I've certainly noticed it's become easier to get replies as my average karma rises. It's also easier to get posts modded up, creating a positive feedback loop (I'm guessing more people vote on posts that are near the top of the page?). Don't have any concrete evidence though.
Well, pg isn't on that leaderboard. Not sure what karma means or what it's worth other to the user than giving one the ability to down-vote (which should require posting a reason for having done so, but that's a different thread).
As a tool or "quality score" that aims to control and keep a forum from derailing this kind of a scoring system has probably done OK. Not sure if it is solely responsible for these effects on sites like HN and SO, but there's not denying that the signal to noise ratio is far better than for example USENET S/N or some forums out there (vBulletin or phpBB type).
Having operated a forum before I can tell you that it can be an absolute nightmare (I was using vBulletin) on many fronts. HN seems to be able to maintain decent quality.
I believe he has a special rule to take himself off - his karma would put him at the top, and I think he used to be on it.
Yeah, he was definitely at the top before, and now he doesn't appear at all. I'm pretty sure you're right, and he coded in a rule to remove himself from the list.
Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet...
Piggybacking off a piggyback comment to take the discussion back on topic:
Didn't realize until stalking through to the author's commentary on his personal blog: http://bradconte.com/hacker-news-parody-thread.html, because the relevant replies (including the author's own: ctrl+f "B-Con") were too far down this thread to ever see without foreknowledge.
> Actually I think I have a solution to this, though its just guesswork.
Darn you ;)