This is sort of interesting to look at, but not too reliable: it only shows users whose profiles happen to be swapped in to the in-memory Arc data structures whenever the list is regenerated. So from day to day, depending on post and caching and HN restart activity, different people are included or omitted. For example, at the moment raganwald isn't on the leaderboard, even though he has >40k karma, presumably because he hasn't posted in a bit, so his profile is swapped out of memory. I filed a bug about that but it got a WONTFIX [1].<p>I ran into that while putting together a profile of prolific HN posters [2]. I put it together a bit at a time over several days, and noticed that people were appearing and disappearing from the list, which seemed odd. I ended up finding a third-party list on Heroku that was more stable day-to-day [3]. However it seems not to be updating any more– the numbers are now a few months old.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html</a><p>[3] <a href="http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall" rel="nofollow">http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall</a>
This reminds me of those lists middle school boys and girls would make within their social circles. "Cutest Boy" or "Nicest Clothes" ... all pointless when looked upon as an older person, but at the time it was all that mattered.
What's interesting to note here is that the points totals have been removed for the top 10. It used to show vast differences between the "leading pack" and the rest... of the order of 20k karma points or so!<p>I guess the rationale for this change is to stop the silly competition (if there was any) once at the top of the pack. I'm not sure there ever was such a competition, mind you. I was #7 once upon a time and it never affected my posting habits.
Getting rid of scores on the top 10 was a step in the right direction, but ultimately the long-term goal should be to get rid of scores for the top 2000.<p>Slashdot used to have a thing where your karma would eventually just say something like, "Lots".
Interestingly, within the top 100 there is a weak positive correlation between the total karma, and the average karma per comment, implying that the people at the top of the leaderboard are actually posting quality content, and not just making up for it with quantity.<p>The closest power law fit is<p><pre><code> predicted average score = 0.27 * (total score) ^ 0.25
</code></pre>
which has a correlation of about 20% with the actual average scores.
I find this slightly embarrassing. It's also broken. For example, I switched from my old account 6 months ago and it's still in the top 30.<p>The main reason we haven't done anything about it is that it's not clear what to do. For example, we could make it use a shorter time window than "forever"—but do we really want to gamify karma further? I doubt it.
Just think what we can do with all those imaginary points.<p>I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky.<p>Maybe using tags that become sub-forums of sorts and the front page is just an aggregate.<p>Like tags for SSL, ddos, security, centos, payment-solutions etc.<p>Tags are not hard to implement, there could even be a limited set to choose from, that only certain users can add to, if there is any concern about new tag creation abuse.<p>And then a submission can span multiple tags, it may get buried under one tag but rank better under other tags.
I really like the average points tracking in Hacker news.<p>Its interesting to note that some people got on the leader board via only commenting when their posts were relevant, the avg. 5+ points people and some got on their through just making sure their voice was heard, even if they didn't have anything relevant to say, the people with an avg below 3 points.<p>I've always treated HN's a bit differently from other message boards in that I only comment when I think I have something relevant to say, which is probably driven from the average point tracking system.<p>I'm actually surprised at the number of leaders with avg scores under 2. I'm guessing these people treat HN's like a regular message board and just comment on everything.
The average of the top 100 seems to be 4.3 so it looks like
An aside, pg isn't on the leaderboards, and never was, since he was always far ahead on points. But, it looks like tptacek has finally passed him.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg</a>
What's the motivation behind posting these? Is there a way to say "these are the kinds of posts that are good for the community" without tacking a number on it?
If given the choice to target users based on GMail data or targeting users based on Facebook data, I would take the former. GMail data would provide you with a much clearer and nuanced profile of someone, even if GMail has only 1/3 - 1/2 the user base. Facebook should do well with consumer brands though.