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A comment on Ask HN: Why is Karma so unfair on HackerNews?.

Re:Ask HN: Why is Karma so unfair on HackerNews? by benologist on Friday January 24, 2014 @10:40PM (#7119745)
Submission karma is utterly worthless. All it means is you submit tons of shit, by hand or by bot. In the last year or two there's been a handful of accounts that made the Leaders list [0] by auto or mass submitting generic tech sites (techcrunch, ars, wired etc... really "safe" stuff), even a couple of company spammers were on it at one point! There's no way to win that contest, but more importantly it's not a measure of anything valuable.

Comment karma is worth paying attention to because it doesn't hinge on being the first to submit whatever AOL just shat out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why is Karma so unfair on HackerNews? by catinsocks on Friday January 24, 2014 @10:45PM (#7119753)
Well submission and comment karma are the same karma on HN so it's hard to tell them apart the only other factor you can look at that might be reasonable or a popularity contest is the average as I believe that only pertains to comment karma.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why is Karma so unfair on HackerNews? by benologist on Friday January 24, 2014 @10:48PM (#7119766)
Yeah that's something I wish they would separate out, on top of the combined score the average itself is not calculated in real time and discards outliers and I think only looks at your recent comments so it's not even a perfect measure, just a better one than submission karma.

I would like to see karma more focused on contribution - comments of course, but also finding quality stories that aren't on mainstream sites.

[ Parent | on HN ]