Is there are any benefits for users with high HN Karma?
There is a nice HN Karma Tracker I found: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/ and it nice.
But I didn't find any use for it yet.
It's completely objective, just as Reddit's count, your Facebook friends, or your Twitter followers. However, it helps in many ways when objectively applied evaluating a person's involvement in the community and commenting reputation.<p>If someone leaves a stark comment and had 10 points and 10 submissions, you can guess they have a lot to learn about this community, however if you find someone in the thousand's+ and has actively engaged in meaningful conversation, you get a better idea on the intent of the commentator in question.<p>Additionally, in the past when personally asking for advice (like this thread), I've used that same logic to help better understand the true value of opinions. I've also heard on two occasions from startup employers something along the lines of "..but what's their HN score?".<p>Oh, and after a certain amount of Karma, you get down-vote ability.
Karma, like any measurement of an individual's value is imperfect. I'd say that it's not closely tied to a user's contributions to the site. And seriously, abstracting something like it represents into one number is problematic except with gross comparisons.<p>A well made comment in a discussion may get 4 - 6 points of karma. A link to tech crunch article or blog post you had nothing to do with may get you 200+ points.<p>People upvote people they like, regardless of the value of the particular comment. This means famous individuals tend to have more karma per post count.<p>I'd personally love more details on karma. especially karma from comments, as separated from karma from posts.
Don't take should from anyone. It is fine not to care about HN karma.<p>Downvotes and upvotes can mean lots of different things - from expressions of agreement/disagreement, to valid/invalid reasoning or facts, to somebody commenting on my personality.<p>The first constructive view of karma I had was as editorial feedback on my writing. If someone downvotes a comment, either I did not communicate my point clearly, or I was mistaken, or it confirms I made my point exactly [I will make comments that I suspect will be downvoted].
From a practical point of view, at 500 karma you get the ability to downvote comments. They may have changed this number by now though.<p>Otherwise, it's a marker signifying what people like that you wrote, and (for downvotes) what people consider unacceptable on HN. That's the main signal I get/give from downvotes: "I wish you hadn't posted that".
Companies and recruiters searching for outstanding developers might filter their search by users with interesting comments and submitions. In other words high karma.