Ever wondered if Hacker News has vote inflation? https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/hacker-news-trends/?q=...

I don't know about vote inflation but I'm pretty sure we need some karma inflation. New users need easier ways to get in the game.

(Of course karma is silly and no one cares very much about it, but it's not nothing, and as long as we have it we should have a system with better circulation.)

As a new user for sure I find it hard to get into the game - it would be nice if there was more information on how to do that.

By far the best way is to submit articles that the community will find interesting. Successful submissions are the way to karma riches. If you want to play that game, looking at past front pages (click 'past' in the top bar) is a good way to get a feel for what the community likes.

From a quality point of view, the best submissions are on obscure topics that haven't been discussed much before. But quality and karma-earning aren't exactly the same thing!

On the contrary, I think that commenting has shown itself to be a faster, easier, and more consistent way to gain karma.

I realize you probably said this as a joke because you've never submitted anything; that said...

Commenting is a decent way! If you opportunistically roam threads, it's not that hard to get quite a bit on each thread.

However, the stories are way quicker as long as you're not submitting them at the wrong time of day (if you check through the profiles of people who submit non-spam and non-political posts frequently, which stories of theirs made it to the front page can almost entirely be predicted by checking /past and seeing if anything submitted +/- 20 minutes from it made it there, outside of the case where they get manually boosted there).

I think submissions could be improved with some simple fixes (famous last words), but it's definitely not terribly difficult to get decent amounts of karma that way if you've got your mind set on it.

No, not joking at all. It's actually a fair amount of work to find good links. While I make a point to not submit stories, the people with the most karma on the site, and those who accumulate it the fastest, gain most of it from comments. Getting stories upvoted is fairly random in comparison; there are a couple (I a particular user in my mind right now) that make this work by submitting like a dozen stories a day, getting 1-2 points on most of them, and then a hundred or so about once a day, but that's not really any worse than commenting because stories don't map one-to-one with karma.

(I should mention that if I don't actively optimize for karma; I exclusively skim threads on the front page for a while and leave comments, coming back a couple times to catch new additions and respond to replies. If you're really trying to rack up karma and can can string a couple of words together on a variety of topics, there's a number of more aggressive karma accumulation strategies you could employ. They're not nearly as enjoyable.)

I may be an outlier in that I've always collected links that I find interesting and periodically revisit them, but I really don't think it's that much work to find links; curious exploring should get you far.

Also, I just want to point out, as someone who plausibly had the fastest accumulation of karma during the first months of having an account,* that "and those who accumulate it the fastest" may not be quite accurate.

* (I actually got called out for it by three different people; my first five thousand points were achieved within (-/+ 5) ninety days of making the account, and that was with fifteen days of not posting anything (my account was made on 91919, which is a palindrome I find nice); my first thousand was within thirty days of making the account.)

> I just want to point out, as someone who plausibly had the fastest accumulation of karma during the first months of having an account

I've mentioned it before, but I silently keep track of people I often see around on Hacker News–what they like to talk about, any affiliations they've mentioned, their positions on perennial topics. Think of it like those extensions that let you put tags next to people's names, except I use a browser that killed its extension community in cold blood so I keep this around in my head instead. An extension wouldn't be of much help, anyways: I find it very difficult to remember to read usernames, so I frequently end up in the curious situation where I'm reading a comment and think "this sounds like something so-and-so would say…wait, yes, it's them" (in certain cases, this can be "this sounds like so-and-so's writing style").

All this is a long way to essentially say that I am quite familiar with prolific users, especially ones that I see submitting things to the homepage or participating in comment threads that I frequent (which is a large subset of what ends up on the front page), so I was well aware of your incredibly rapid karma accumulation within weeks of the creation of your account. I factored this in to my statement above, which I will admit I haven't actually run the numbers on precisely but still stand behind unless you've happen to have done the math on this and would like to share. Here's why I think that comments come out ahead.

Hacker News is a fairly small community, but even inside it there are people who interact with it disproportionately and accumulate karma quickly and readily. As far as I can tell, both of us are in the top dozen or so karma accumulators on the site, which means that we're averaging 20-50 karma a day. I personally have been not very consistent–I didn't use Hacker News too much when I started out (I was a lurker for a couple of months before even registering, so I wasn't used to commenting)–and this year until about spring I was on-and-off with my contributions, reading a bit more or a bit less depending on outside workload, and at one point not being on the site at all for a month as a bet. These days I'm on fairly often, so I get a decent amount of karma consistently.

If we look at other top users, I think the pattern is similar. 'tptacek has a truly insane average of something like 70 karma a day going back all the way to 2007 (although I think he's slowed down slightly right now?), which is like the top quartile of what I get on average. Other users, including you, have more reasonable but still fairly high numbers as far as I can tell.

Taking this into account, I still think that comments make up the majority of karma for most of these users, for a number of reasons one of which is probably the fact that stories are downranked when calculating karma by something like 2x AFAIK. If you go through 'tptacek's or 'jacquesm's profiles right now, you'll notice that they post stories once in a while, and they even hit the front page occasionally, but not nearly enough to make up more than a small fraction of their karma. I think even you, whom I used to recall got things on the front page once or twice a week, would have a hard time accumulating karma that quickly if you also didn't comment abundantly.

I'm not saying it's impossible to get karma through stories, but it's uncommon and among the top posters I think there's perhaps one that doesn't comment at all, a few that post stories frequently, and the remainder who submit rarely if at all.

For what it's worth, belatedly: I think there's also a pretty important compounding effect; a Markov 'tptacek would still accumulate karma. In part I think that's because people follow my comments (following people instead of the front page is a really good way to use the site, which can be crazymaking otherwise) --- I've seen evidence for this, like commenting on very old stories and seeing those comments bumped --- and part of it is probably just a name-recognition thing in threads.

Which is to say: a significant factor in karma accumulation is just how long you've been on the site.

We should just get rid of it altogether!

Sure, but at least it's not like Stack Overflow where you can just sit around and accumulate karma interest forever. I think that counts for something :)

Well, as long as we're replying in this thread at week-long intervals (I just saw this!) I would like to add that I think HN needs some karma inflation to make it easier for newer users to get in the game. Not that karma matters very much, but it does have a gamelike quality.

I also want to change HN's leaderboard to show leaders by different criteria, including on (say) a weekly/monthly/yearly/alltime basis. Maybe that would help bring in some fresh air.

Speaking of the leaderboard, I was actually curious how it was organized: there are some people missing from it that I would expect to be there, like 'pg. How is that list generated?