[bambax]

This only measures the number of comments; it would be interesting to know the karma difference accrued in a year. It may produce the exact same ranking, as intuitively karma is probably heavily correlated with comment frequency... but maybe not?

[wly_cdgr]

Karma in my experience has a lot more to do with comment tone and with reading the room well than with the quality of the comment's content. I accumulated I think about 500-600 karma in 2021, but most of that was just me saying stuff that a lot of people in the thread wanted to believe is true. On the other hand I lost a lot of karma from comments that had the same quality or higher in terms of content, but where I was contemptuous or dismissive or flippant in tone, or just went against the grain. I guess even smart nerds are bland herd normies for the most part

[crdrost]

It's worse than that, karma is mostly about location location location.

You're talking about probability of upvote, but that needs to be multiplied by the number of people who read the comment, and that depends heavily on where it is on the comment page itself. When I look at my karma on my recent comments they have very little to do with how much time I spent on them or how unique my perspective is... I even wonder if that aspect is gameable sometimes, whether you could guess the probability that with your upvote a comment that has been recently posted 5 minutes ago could be boosted above the top comment posted 5 hours ago, and if the 15 minute ago one was interesting enough maybe it would be self-sustaining up there, and you could potentially produce the second comment in the page by replying to it. But that's a lot of math when probably if you're trying to optimize karma/comment there are better heuristics, “always comment on any post that is on the front page with < 20 points and < 20 comments” or so, just increasing volume of things that are probably in the right place to be upvoted.

[wly_cdgr]

Which all adds up to, karma doesn't mean shit. We already knew that, but it not matter because lizard brain like see number go up

[mgh2]

Every community is bound to contain some bias, that is unavoidable. But at least "nerds" or the more educated are bound to decrease this human error with a more "peer-reviewed" process in curating information, that is one purpose of HN.

[MertsA]

Just looking through the top of the list I see a lot of usernames that I'm not familiar with and some of the more recognizable users further down. There is definitely a significant difference between comment count and karma.

[TigeriusKirk]

There's an all-time karma list as a feature of the board. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

[baxtr]

Karma is interesting. But also comment length. A short comment like mine is much less effort than a well thought out proper in-depth answer.