[minimaxir]

This is a reminder that account karma on Reddit and Hacker News doesn't really mean anything and doesn't make your posts more valuable, or give it any additional benefit in the algorithms. (I say that as someone with 153k Reddit karma and a user ranked #57 on the HN leaderboards: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders )

Going truly viral on Reddit/HN is still ultimately random as well, which is why reposting (within reasonable amounts) is allowed on both platforms.

As someone who works on social media automation/tooling for their day job (2018 rough overview of my work: https://tech.buzzfeed.com/how-were-building-superpowers-for-... ), I do agree that ML/AI can be helpful to aid human curation, but definitely not a magic end-all-be-all that growth hackers nowadays want it to be. Simple heuristics can be very powerful as well.

[sixstringtheory]

HN bestows various abilities once you pass certain karma thresholds. It's the only site I know of that does this and I think it really helps keep a better community.

It's a direct counterexample to the other comments saying karma is meaningless and isn't or shouldn't be used as a proxy for trust. It might be misplaced trust in some cases, but it is trust nonetheless.

[cestith]

Slashdot and StackOverflow give you more capabilities with a higher reputation. Slashdot likes to give moderator points to people with higher reputations, and to people who metamoderate frequently which is itself guarded by reputation. Your votes are recorded at StackOverflow with no real reputation, but they only count for or against a post if you yourself have a high enough score - I forget what they call your reputation/karma/whatever there.

[sixstringtheory]

Ah, how could I forget StackOverflow?? Thanks for reminding me.

[minimaxir]

The highest threshold for unlocking features HN is at 501 karma (comment downvoting), which is not a lot and is mostly there to limit abuse.

More importantly, it doesn't affect the submission ranking algorithm at all.

[greycol]

I hear that if you reach rank 50 or above on the HN leaderboard you gain the ability to have your posts appear with <blink> in rainbow colours but those who have it are too wise to use this power.

More seriously these posts got me interested in what features besides downvoting would be added at various karma levels which led me to your git page on the topic. Linked here for others interested:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

[sixstringtheory]

I appreciated your joke because the latest trend I hate about reddit are the party-parrot-esque avatars. I immediately scroll them off the screen, couldn't care less what they have to say. (I say this as a lover of the party parrot, but, time & place people...)

[pugworthy]

> ...doesn't really mean anything and doesn't make your posts more valuable..

True for posts, and true for comments if they get upvotes. Downvotes however make comments less valuable. I imagine some people see the gray/faded comments and just presume low value content, which may not be the case.

[pmiller2]

I have showdead turned on, and, while you're right that most greyed out comments are low quality, there are a few that are just inexplicably greyed out. I vouch for these whenever possible, even if I don't necessarily agree with the content of the comment.

[fireattack]

I think he meant that your karma on your account won't affect your posts. (And I agree.. you can even see the karma of the poster without clicking into his username.)

The points you got for a particular post of course matters, since it affects the visibility.

[nullc]

Many subreddits have automod set to hide (or hold for moderation) posts/comments from posters with below some threshold karma.

You may not even know this is being done to you because it uses a shadowban-esq mechanism where the comments remain visible to you.

[elliotbnvl]

Username checks out.

[bromuro]

I see this kind of comments quite often - what is the point checking out the username? Is an underground internet meme i’ve been missing? (No native English speaker here)

[elliotbnvl]

It means that the username is appropriate to the body of the comment. It's very common on Reddit.

[minimaxir]

It's a Reddit meme.