Hacker News Karma Tracker

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this.<p>&#62; Speed percentile: 98.82%<p>While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research...<p>It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, because I tell myself I'm above accumulating imaginary points on the internet, but obviously, I don't seem to be.<p>In some ways, it's curious. My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure.<p>EDIT: After thinking about it some more, I've decided karma isn't entirely worthless in real life. It is a metric that lets you know how well other people like your written work. Over time, I've slowly come to realize what will get upvoted and what will not. This ability could have interesting repercussions in the way I write about my research, or the way that I craft something like grant or fellowship applications. Every person is different, but posting on HN reveals to me that, in the aggregate, there are certain things you can say that have a certain appeal to others, and the capacity to recognize this could in fact be useful in many life situations.

Is it easy to separate karma aquired from submissions and karma aquired from comments? My average comment karma is below 3 and I've only had a few comments over 20 but most of my karma has come from 2 or 3 submissions of interesting links, which seems almost like cheating.<p>I think the most karma I ever got was from being the first to post about Sublime Text 2. This was interesting but I only got the karma because I beat everyone else by a few seconds. I feel that's far less valuable than the odd thing I've spotted which no one else would have ever come across.<p>In the same way, I wonder how many people have high karma just because they are one of the first to comment on popular submissions.<p>Edit: typo (I wonder how proof reading my comment more would have affect my karma)

This was interesting initially, when I just "ego-surfed" it when the link was first submitted, because of the richness of the data displayed. It became more interesting, as the discussion here in this thread developed, when I realized I could look up any arbitrarily chosen user, for example the user who kindly submitted this link, freework, to see the same rich data for that user.<p>The current user interface on Hacker News proper shows a leader board<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders</a><p>and discloses total karma and recent comment karma average on each user's user profile, e.g.,<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult</a><p>But this interface offers more, and prompts me to look up some fellow users to see what their detailed statistics look like. As I expected, cwan, who gains almost all of his karma from submissions rather than comments, has a higher percentile than anyone else who began participating here in the same month.<p>AFTER EDIT: Link to an old discussion I tried to stir up, on a topic which other users are discussing in this thread, "Ask HN: What Kinds of Comments Should Be Upvoted?"<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084</a><p>I'm always interested in how to emphasize the positive by upvoting early and often when I see good stuff here, so I like to hear opinions from all of you about what is good stuff.<p>P.S. By following the links from the submitted site, I am reminded that patio11 and I seem to have the same join date. I'm honored to be behind him in any ranking that includes the both of us.

The beta testers: <a href="https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/october-2006" rel="nofollow">https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/october-2006</a>. I had no idea John Resig of jQuery fame is a YC alum.<p>Then there's a gap of three months months before the early adopters: <a href="https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/february-2007" rel="nofollow">https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/month/february-2007</a>.

I think you're missing an important metric: karma per submission. People with high KPS tend to be those who keep their mouths shut most of the time but when they do have something to say it's generally worth paying attention. I think this is the kind of behavior that really ought to be encouraged more than contributions per unit time.<p>Also, the see-your-data feature fails on Safari.

The problem with karma implementations is that they don't always encode for the best outcome. I am not sure what karma means on HN. There are some topics where you could very easily fish for karma by going with the prevailing thoughts in any given community. Post against the grain and loose karma. It's fairly predictable in most communities.<p>Then there are effects as I've seen in some of the Stack Exchange sites. One that comes to mind is ServerFault. Moderators and high-karma members with elevated privileges have turned that particular site into a nearly unusable and hostile environment for anyone outside a very narrow definition of what the "gang" wants.<p>This is an interesting effect because it encodes what a few privileged users want as opposed to what --conjecture-- a larger majority might be looking for out of the site. And, from a strict business view of the problem it reduces that audience and the applicability of the site/s by a potentially significant factor.<p>It's like having a mechanical engineering site where high-karma users have decided they only want to discuss hex bolts used by aircraft mechanics. You show-up to ask about hex bolts used on motorcycles and watch out!<p>Perhaps the ultimate questions --on a site-per-site basis-- might be:<p><pre><code> - What's the design intent behind karma or user reputation? - What is it you want to encode? - How do you ensure that this is, in fact, encoded into the rating? - How do you prevent users from polluting or de-valuing karma through misinterpretation, petty/spiteful voting, "gang-like" behavior or other degenerations? - If karma is used to elevate user rights, how does it also affect responsibilities? Does it impose a level of accountability? - How do you keep karma "wars" from affecting your community? By this I mean gang-like behavior by regulars who'll attack outside their pack with the only tool they have, karma. - How to you keep karma from affecting site business? - Short of the benevolent dictator model, is there a better approach to encoding user value, participation or relevance? </code></pre> Not an easy problem to solve as most communities have discovered. For the most part HN seems to regulate rather nicely. We are all guilty of veering off here and there but eventually things come back to a reasonable center. Maybe it's because posts age very quickly and it takes a lot to stay in the first page or two. Other types of sites don't have that advantage.

It's just a number in a database. What you say and how you say it is more important than what other people think of it. If your words are important to you and you said them in earnest, why does it matter?<p>Side note: You may even be unconsciously censoring yourself in fear of losing karma. It's a similar effect to suddenly having a lot of followers on Twitter.

I have always wondered what the top karma list would look like if it was broken down into two lists: comment karma and submission karma. Has anyone done this?

Some other stats that could be interesting:<p>Show how many people / what percentage have 500 karma (which presumably is what it takes to downvote.)<p>Show how much karma a person would currently need to be at the 25th, 50th, 66th, 75th, 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles (or whatever percentiles make sense).

Most interesting thing to me: this month is my fifth anniversary with an HN account. I actually started lurking before that, in the Startup News days, but I didn't really have anything to contribute until it broadened scope.

Not sure if it's a bug or my browser is just too old, but on Safari 5.1.7 (OS X 10.6.8), the "See your Data" button doesn't do anything. Works fine in Chrome.

Is there an extension that will hide my karma from me? I habitually glance at it and it does me no good, it's just noise.

This is a very good tool to track patterns in the community. Realize that each of the top 200 users represent a given demographic. If you see the change over time for each user, you can pinpoint those patterns and adjust to it (if you are selling something to that market). You can also quickly learn how to create your own organic circle of upvoters, so that your company posts hit the front page without needing to email everyone in your network so they can come in and upvote (which is do not approve of and not do). Its good to create your own niche audience inside such a powerful community like this one.

Why are the usernames case sensitive?<p>michaelapproved is not a valid username when searching but MichaelApproved is. Does HN allow for different case usernames or is it something that was overlooked during development of the search feature?

Why is aaronbrethorst ranked both 38 and 39 in the "Overall karma leaders" list?

<p><pre><code> pg (129961) As of: Mon Feb 04 2013 07:34:16 GMT+0200 (IST) Among all active users Total users: 13431 Total users with less karma: 13430 Your rank: 1st Overall karma percentile: 100.00% Average karma increase per day: 56.260 Total users with slower increasing karma: 13427 Your speed rank: 4th Speed percentile: 99.98% Among active users from your registration month (October 2006) Total users: 9 Total users with less karma than you: 8 Your rank: 1st Percentile: 100.00%</code></pre>

That is interesting. If you want more information on them, including photos and twitter info, you can see it on <a href="http://www.hnwho.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hnwho.com</a>

It would be nice to see the list by comment karma only. That's the one list that I haven't actually seen anyone create so far.

Does anyone have advice about improving my karma? I'm roughly 42nd percentile. I suppose lurking doesn't help.

I like this!<p>Is there any way of fitting some kind of averaging in there? There is karma per day, so perhaps posts per day?<p>Also, (<a href="http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars" rel="nofollow">http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars</a>)<p>98 and 99 appear to be duplicates.

The fact that this is not using Twitter Bootstrap makes me so happy. It's delightfully refreshing to see something that uses even just the barebones rails scaffolding styles.

Neat. One thing I noticed though... my karma isn't correct even though it states it was last updated today. I haven't commented in almost a week prior to this comment.

I really like the website. I have currently got interested in getting more karmas. Anyone has any suggestion as to how to increase karmas quickly?

Very cool website!! I predict some people watching this site just to keep an eye on your position... It's tempting!

Not that I care much about these karma values, but ideally something like this should be part the HN site itself.

This is pretty cool haha, it tracks and it gives accurate data. Very very quickly to. Great job.

Today I learn that I am not the worst karma gaining person from my registration month.

No surprise, but it doesn't seem to work on the BlackBerry browser.

it lists total users as 11777 that looks like a very small number for hn which sends 10-20k visits if a site hits top spot. or are there a lot of lurkers who never signup?

very cool piece of work.<p>Would be even cooler if I could get stats of my most popular threads and comments. It would be also interesting to see pg's most popular thread and comment.

Sweet, now I can tell who the popular kids are.

SMH

Cool...<p>But it would be nice if all these "small" (not criticizing in any way here) websites allowed either query parameters in the URL or directly "short URLs" (like bit.ly etc.) so we could share links.<p>(maybe I missed it?)