Pretty soon 100 karma won't even buy you a gallon of milk, much less the small 2-bedroom colonial home it used to back in '08 or '09. (Not counting east or west coasts... Hard to find anything under 300 karma there.)<p>At least it's still harder currency than FB likes or Twitter retweets. Those internet points might as well be $5 billion Zimbabwe notes.
There's a similar issue on reddit. For a growing sub (which most interesting subs are) sorting by top of all time and top of this year is the same thing. I wish there were a way to sort by top by year on a sub (and HN too of course).
The other consideration is that the traffic (and submissions) have grown likely 50x plus but the front page still only has 30 slots, and so the 'needle eye' is a lot smaller.<p>One could argue that a story that makes it to the front page today is much higher quality than one that did so years before.<p>You get more for 100 points, just like in economic inflation terms, you get more for a consumer electronic that has stayed roughly the same price but quality and features have increased considerably.
Brilliant work. And it makes me think - we produce tools, that are part of two phase spaces - the idea and the knowledge of how to create it. Firstly I simply would not have thought of it, "like button inflation" is a pretty off the wall concept. On top of which I don't know where to get an HN data feed or how to make a chrome extension etc.
Yesterday I was on a call with a collegue and the conversation turned to a useful feature we did not have (internal use) - and 30 minutes after the idea we had coded it up - because we had the knowledge but only lacked the idea till that moment.<p>Without that knowledge even the best idea moves the process from "yeah let's do it" to "I should schedule some time and make a project plan and ..."<p>The difference is important somehow. And most of our working lives would be better if we stopped with the project plans and just built useful stuff.<p>Edit: To try and clarify - exploring a new and uncharted phase space is <i>exploration</i> - it cannot be planned in advance, or driven in a particular direction. Sun-Tzu teaches that Climate, Landscape and doctrine all affect our success as much or more than mission and leadership - so we should stop trying to control and actually find the flow.<p>I think we search for product-market fit, we do not <i>decide</i> product market fit.<p>One tool I realise i have been trying to build on and off is a post-hoc reporting tool that makes it look like my exploratory development style was actually planned (it's always something like, I am going to explore this inferring hill over there, and just make sure the roadmap, docs and timesheets are up to date.) This way I don't get people bothering me so much. It works better than grumpy.
>The number of points a story has accumulated on Hacker News is a good indicator for how relevant and overall how good the story is.<p>Sorta. I think it is also demonstrative how much effort there is or how popular the subject is, but this does not mean it is good. If I could change things, it would be that some stories do not stay on the front page so long. Stories about apple news tend to get a lot of points but I don't think they are the most interesting, at least in my opinion. I think there are too many science stories, from maybe 3 science sources(quanta magazine, nautilus,and one other).
I'm curious how closely this would match overall HN traffic -- if only very loosely, or if almost pixel-for-pixel.<p>Only @dang could tell us!<p>(It's not at all obvious to me that as HN has grown more popular, whether the proportion of voting to non-voting users would have changed as well.)
This is cool, and it would be fun to see top stories by year, and top Show HNs by year.<p>I posted a Show HN [1] when I was new-ish here, and I didn't realize how unusually successful it had been until I saw we were getting web traffic from a site (now defunct) that listed the top 10 Show HN posts of all time.<p>I've periodically used the HN search function to see what the top HN posts have been, but with the point inflation it's become difficult to make meaningful comparisons across time.<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784</a>
The shape of the curve is fascinating. You see exponential growth in the early part, which makes sense, but then it sort of converges to a bumpy linear function. Network effects would suggest power law growth, which linear fits into, but this just seems too linear. Normal currency inflation is usually measured as a percentage per year, which implies exponential growth. What is the current %points change per month, for instance?
Nice and interesting analysis. Thank you for sharing.<p>I now think HN and Reddit and others should consider inflation by default when you search for top posts of all time for example.
This is great. I was suggesting a similar feature for search HN literally only a couple of weeks ago:<p><a href="https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/207" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/207</a><p>Looking forward to using!
> It's basically the average point count of the top 100 stories of each day.<p>How sensitive are the results to changing 100? Using a smaller number would be more accurate for the top posts.<p>You could also use an algorithm that uses different calculations based on the popularity of the original post.
It would be interesting to see a 'best' page based on inflation-adjusted scores:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/best" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/best</a><p>That would require indexing the inflation adjusted scores of every post (or at least, every post that has ever made it to the front page, or maybe just every day's #1 if you assume that no day's #2 and below could ever outrank any other day's #1) rather than adjusting the score of posts on the current page, which is more than can reasonably be expected from an extension, so I'm not actually making a feature request... unless you feel like it.
The biggest issue is that stories posted by people with high karma hit the front page even if they're off topic/dupes/garbage, while good new submissions often fail to get much promotion.
I have noticed the opposite happen on Dwitter.net (a visual creative coding community) - I think it takes more thought, time, and effort to come up with new
code tricks (or use existing ones in a new interesting way). Similarly, certain visual motifs have been explored and seen by those who have been on the site for a while. There is still a steady influx of people so I think it is the nature of lower-hanging fruit becoming less impressive to the average dweet enthusiant.
Mapping the current points would be more interesting to me in practice. Right now, when you install the extension and read the frontpage you just see the points doubled, which is pretty useless. But if the extension would pick a fixed date - say 1.1.2020 - and then recomputes the data of older and newer submission with their exact inflation ratio relative to that date, then you would have a stable comparison point also useful for new articles.
Interestingly, the upvotes are quite inconsistent across multiple resubmissions of the same URL. Instead of adjusting against inflation, I think the HN formula itself should be adjusted: HNFormula(age,upvotes)/views. I'm working on a blog post about that, here is my current draft: <a href="https://felix.unote.io/hacker-news-scores" rel="nofollow">https://felix.unote.io/hacker-news-scores</a>
This happens on most sites, including reddit, but the opposite happened on stack overflow. I started posting there when I was in uni, but mostly stopped when I got a job.<p>Yet because the traffic has grown, those comments keep (or kept) accumulating karma. More interesting, because I answered some questions that became highly popular, I get a much larger share of the karma than others who have had to spend more time researching.
Not only this but also the number of votes from users who were active years ago is also a very interesting metric to see. No doubt HN audience has changed over the years and votes from original users are diluted by votes from new comers. It won't be easy to do but one could aggregate "favorites" from all users on a daily basis and only count the votes from users with an old registered date.
FYI: If you read Hacker News via RSS, check out <a href="https://hnrss.org/" rel="nofollow">https://hnrss.org/</a> , which allows you to filter the feed by points/comments.<p>e.g.<p><a href="https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=100&comments=25" rel="nofollow">https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=100&comments=25</a>
Pretty soon we will have to start borrowing karma from China and leaving a debt for our children. The only solution is to create a deflationary blockchain based karma solution that makes fewer votes get recorded over time based on increasingly difficult proof of work.
I've always thought something similar should apply to stackoverflow. Points from newer questions should be worth increasingly more, as more and more questions (specially the easy ones) are already answered
Very nice realization of the idea. The extension is a sweet perk.<p>I was thinking about something like this some time ago. I also wonder how it compares with comment count per post and score/comments ratio in time.
this is a wonderful topic that i have always kinda wondered about informally. a slightly adjacent question ive had is how much does the rank of a post feeback into votes. my assumption is that the higher the ranking, the higher the absolute number of votes the ranking itself (independent from the actual article) generates. coupling some kind of way of compensating for that with your historical inflation adjustment would give you a fairly uniform metric for gauging public reception to submissions i think.
Love the web app, but my browser extension space is so limited I'm not sure I want to add another with such marginal (however interesting!) value. Thank you for posting.
All 1 point show as 2 points. Shouldn't those be 1 point regardless of date since it's the base and it means some specific post had no upvotes?
> The extension is available for Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately the extension is only available as a direct download for Chrome because I didn't bother paying Google money to publish this extension. The Firefox extension is available in the official Add-On store.<p>This is so sad... I knew they required a paid account to submit to google play, didn't realise that applied to the browser extension repo as well. Oh well, just another reason to stay on Firefox :p