Ask HN: For users with 10k+ karma, how much time do you spend on HN?

[minmax2020]

Just curious about the economics of karma. For me, it takes so much mental energy just to even read a typical link shared on HN, so I usually skim through it and read the comments. So naturally got curious how much time do people spend if they have active discussions about topics here.

[dijit]

I have nearly 25k karma. I also have ADHD, these are somewhat related.

Most of my Karma comes from really random comments that I assume people will not like to hear. The overwhelming majority of my comments will never get more than one upvote (if it even gets that).

The comments that earn karma are really 50/50 between if I get flagged or suddenly get 50 upvotes.

Regardless, you shouldn't ever expect to get any upvotes, karma doesn't matter except to add some amount of merit that someone is not a troll. Outside of that it's quite useless.

Answering the question, it ranges from 15 minutes to 4hours a day.

[causi]

The comments that earn karma are really 50/50 between if I get flagged or suddenly get 50 upvotes.

Always a fun time when you get flagged and personally reprimanded by dang but your comment is tremendously upvoted.

[teekert]

For me this occurs with my comments that are overly anti US and snarky ("Omg bad healthcare, so third world, bla bla"), or when I get too political ("Yeah but Hillary was not really an alternative, she's an arms dealer..."), often on (soon to be) flagged threads. Yeah I listen to no Agenda from time to time, downvote me ;)

My posts mentioning Ayn Rand are also heavily fluctuating, sometimes tipping up, sometimes tipping down.

I always wonder: What are the most up AND down voted comments? I mean you can score a 1 with 0 votes, or with 100 up and 100 down (I guess, not sure if that is the formula). The second remark is of a different nature but will not give different karma.

FWIW, In all cases I agreed with Dang. I get carried away "twitter style" sometimes. Dang guards the quality (no short snide flaming remarks) and focus (we talk tech here people) of HN threads well.

For comments I find that a polarizing comment may yield karma but tip one way or the other (you know, it will polarize), but finding a smart middle ground though, is quite a sure way to score karma.

[causi]

Yeah I wish we got to see both instead of just the current balance. You'll notice your comments do better at first and then drop later, I suspect because some interests have google alerts or the like set up. I started getting muted a lot less often when I started keeping a list of "sacred cows" that will quickly get you flagged for a divergent opinion.

[teekert]

I have over 9000! (in Vegeta voice)

Same goes for me. I'm suspecting some form of ADD (but I'm highly functional, so no need for diagnosis, it does runs in the family, other family members are less lucky.)

I can spend a large part of my day here running/hiding from the ultra boring parts of my work.

I imagine my karma comes both from submissions and comments. Some submissions have 100+ karma, some comments can go to ~40 karma. Most are 1-2 karma, some 5-15 (take this with pinch of salt, I didn't really analyze it, it's a guess).

[thiht]

> except to add some amount of merit that someone is not a troll

Idk, some of my posts that gave me the most karma, I would consider mild trolling

[Y_Y]

I just buy my karma from dang. YC is obviously having some hard times at the moment so it's a win-win really.

[onion2k]

Maybe YC should launch dangcoin...

[CoastalCoder]

It could be propped up by Roblimo coin.

[jraph]

You are obviously getting ripped off, you should be able to strike a better deal. I know you can if you use the right words.

[riffraff]

I have 15k karma (!) and I guess I spend more than an hour a day reading stuff around here.

But I think the time doesn't matter at all, as a large part of the karma is just a few links that got popular. The rest is having frequented the site for a very, very long time :)

EDIT: and of course, I don't think internet points do much good, I would not object to hiding it completely.

[pavlov]

37k karma. I keep posting because at 50k points you get to hang out with Tom Cruise at the Y Combinator Celebrity Center.

What’s that? Wrong cult? Now you tell me…

I don’t submit much, so the karma is from comments. Most of the time I manage to refrain from poor jokes like the one above because they do result in downvotes. In that sense karma seems to be serving its purpose as a soft content regulation mechanism.

I mostly type comments on the phone in idle moments — the typical usage scenario for an online social network. The iOS Screen Time feature suggests that I’ve spent an average of 40 min / day on this site for the past week, which sounds right.

Social networks tend to be addictive, but at least HN is benign because it doesn’t have an endless feed nor algorithmically boosted emotionally provocative viral content. I’ve certainly got much more pleasure and utility out of HN than I ever did with Twitter, for example.

[pizza234]

5.6k karma (so I don't qualify), but I thought it'd be interesting for comparison.

My karma is exclusively from comments. There is no continuity, but I'd say I spent 15 minutes/day in average.

15 minutes per day spent in thoughtful and respectful (as possible :)) arguments, which is part of the HN culture, is some of the most productive time I ever spend.

I don't spend time reading articles in realtime - I store the most interesting from an RSS feed, and read them asynchronously; I don't consider this HN time.

[Jun8]

Similar situation for me (8.7k), i.e. almost all my karma is from comments. I suspect people with high karma scores have a much higher submission to comment karma ratio.

I spend quite a bit of time here, on the order of 1-2 hours per day. Approximately 80% of that time is spent in reading comments, which is where the value of HN is really. In the ~15 years I’ve been here I’ve learned which comment threads is useful to join the conversation and which are flame wars to be avoided. When I comment I spend time to add links and additional information, if possible, to try to add value to the discussion.

AFAIK HN is the only board on the Internet that Ofer’s a truly amazing variety of submissions and thoughtful commentary in these, just in the last days we had entries ranging from quaternions to Montaigne.

[prepend]

I didn’t pay attention to karma for a while then started using it as a proxy for whether I have comment replies (like Reddit’s orangered mail icon).

I haven’t counted my comments, but I expect that I spend 20-60 minutes per day and maybe read 25 articles and comment on 10 a day.

I cut out next about 5 years ago and spend much less time on Reddit now that they got rid of their old mobile site. So this serves as my news substitute and “community” and market research for work (to learn about new data and tech software and companies to try out). And I don’t use any social media.

It does take mental energy to read and discuss, but that’s where I choose to focus and think it’s worthwhile. I find it better for mood and would just get angry after using social media or reading rage news, so this is a way to charge up and learn not only from the topics but from the thoughtful comments.

I first used the internet in 1994 and was a bit late for the well and early online communities, but I like the idea of people connected together working on a common good. HN isn’t that or anything but I feel like there are others with a similar mindset.

[josteink]

The first rule of karma: don’t care about karma ;)

That said I got around 14k and I’m not spending an awful lot of time on HN on a regular basis (less than an hour daily, passive, reading). Posting, like now, is something I maybe do weekly.

But I’ve been here for years. Small upvotes over time do count.

[jgrahamc]

85537 karma in 16 years. It’s the years that made the difference.

Most of my karma is from submissions. I don’t get involved in discussions often.

eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36067490

[pjc50]

I'm right next to you on the leaderboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

.. but from the opposite scoring. I rarely submit anything, I'm just a poster in the comments section. One of these days I'm going to scrape out all my comments so I can rank them by score, maybe recycle them into Content.

Couple of key tips:

- if you're going to post an interesting link in the comments, take a moment to post it to /new first

- activity is highest at the top of threads, so piggyback off that

- if you're going to post jokes, make sure you post the explanation as well in the same comment

I have "noprocrast" set to 20 minutes on / two hours off, usually. So usually one or two 20 minute sessions per day.

[saalweachter]

It's hilarious to me that I only recognize 3-5 of the top ten posters, because I almost never pay attention to who submitted a story.

[newfie_bullet]

TIL there's a karma leaderboard on hacker news!

[m463]

now things will go downhill.

I vaguely recall slashdot did something like "karma: excellent" or something to minimize karma as a score?

[buro9]

Hardly any. I dip in from time to time.

I tend to only comment on things I'm knowledgeable about or have reflected on, or that overlap to my experience. As such the comments tend to be relevant and to some degree insightful, and they get upvotes.

I'm not really aware of karma until someone IRL knows the site and is shocked by the number being high.

There's little worth in the karma. This morning I read a really insightful comment by someone with barely 600 karma (noticed as I was trying to figure out what they might be working on it interested in that gave them the perspective/experience). High karma doesn't feel valuable to game.

[fredley]

11k. I visit a few times a day, for the last 12 years. I rarely comment or post, and ~10% of my karma is from one front page post, and likewise the rest of it is heavily skewed towards a few popular posts / comments.

[LinuxBender]

So naturally got curious how much time do people spend if they have active discussions about topics here.

Off and on throughout the day I will stop by the computer and see what the world is up to. I enjoy seeing what people think about the topics that make get voted on here. Submitting articles forces me to read through the corporate media's oddly tainted world views and then tease some of them apart here. Half of the things I submit I either do not agree with or do not like but I want to see how many others have different perspectives that I may have missed. HN has a lot of smart and experienced people and I appreciate their takes on things. For anything too taboo or too politically slanted I share on 4chan instead to see what the other half of the internet thinks. Some of them are here too and that is a fun overlap.

As for mental energy I step away if I find myself too immersed in a topic. There are plenty of things to get done in the fields. Plenty of animals to take care of, mostly wild critters but also some horses. If I find I am the odd one out in a topic I ask the horses if I am being illogical or if I am in a bubble. They nod and ask for more treats.

[Dowwie]

Other than the karma requirement for downvoting, are any HN algorithms driven by karma scores? I don't know what karma gets you here.

[causi]

I never bothered remembering my password or using a real e-mail address so each of my devices has their own HN account. I've noticed my flags and vouches have a more immediate effect with the account with the most karma than they do on the one that only has a thousand. HN certainly has unpublished behavior but it's generally subtle enough you can't tell whether it's automated or being done by a mod, except the instances where you have no flagged or downvotes and still get muted, then you know it's a manual action.

[Dowwie]

@dang can you shed some light on this?

[causi]

Why would he? If he's chosen not to disclose certain site behavior it's because he thinks it's for the good of the site.

[Dowwie]

That's IF there is such a policy, but why would there be one? Why would it be for the good of the site if this weren't disclosed? Do you think that this warrants discretion?

[causi]

Do you think that this warrants discretion?

I don't, but the powers that be do. If you read the occasional submission with that site that documents HN's behaviors that aren't listed on an HN page, you'll see it lists certain things like needing 500 karma to downvote but you may note that some behaviors repeatedly reported in the comments are never added to the site. Is that on purpose? I don't know.

HN is a good site with good discussion. You just have to accept that sometimes you're going to get muted with a "you're posting too fast" message even when you've only made two comments in the last twelve hours, neither of which are flagged, and both of which have positive scores.

[andrewmcwatters]

I’m curious what the distribution of karma is on HN, but I haven’t bothered to write a polite scraping method of reading through user’s profiles to grab counts that’s only a little more GET-y than just a human reading HN yet.

I’ve been curious about this for a long time though, already having pulled statistics like distributions of GitHub followers and stargazers.

[abetusk]

It's pretty old (3+ years) but I did some sophomoric analysis on some HN data [0]. I just added a frequency-karma plot and it looks power law, which should be no big surprise. Using a MLE from John Cook [1], the exponent looks to be about -1.1.

[0] https://abetusk.github.io/yahnda/

[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/11/24/estimating-the-exp...

[andrewmcwatters]

Nice work! This is basically exactly what I was curious about. Thanks for satisfying my itch. Kudos for the db snapshot, too!

[lucideer]

> a polite scraping method

Shouldn't be needed, there's an API.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

[andrewmcwatters]

Oh thank you, I always forget about this thing.

[snowwrestler]

Karma per account is a power law distribution. You can see the top 100 accounts here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Everyone else has less karma than these folks… the long tail.

I haven’t graphed it, but my subjective sense is that my karma per comment is distributed similarly. Most comments get approximately 1 karma point, but occasionally one comment will get dozens or even hundreds of upvotes.

[andrewmcwatters]

We’ll of course it’s a power law, but that doesn’t tell you anything about whether 5000 karma is the 20th or the 33th percentile.

[zimpenfish]

If I'm querying 'abetusk's SQLite data correctly, 5000 karma would be the 99.64th percentile.

    sqlite> select count(*), sum(karma > 5000), sum(karma <= 5000) from users;
    558905|2018|556887

2018 from 558905 is 0.36%. Using the stats extension from sqlean confirms it.

    sqlite> select percentile(0+karma, 99.64) from users;
    4952.0
    sqlite> select percentile(0+karma, 99.65) from users;
    5070.50800000003

[saagarjha]

When I was back in college it was something like 2-3 hours a day (one can only pay so much attention to their professor’s wildly incorrect understanding of how C works…). I have more places to split my time these days so I probably average 10-30 minutes, with high variance depending on how busy I am on any given day.

[neom]

Depends on the week/day. Sometimes I don't have much going on so I'll spend a day bouncing around between HN/Youtube/outside world, some weeks I'm super busy and I have no time, some months I don't load HN. However, I'm not sure HN karma is primarily about the time investment. To me it's about only submitting things that are decent and only commenting when I have something valuable to say. I have two criteria: I'm an expert in the thing being discussed, or, I can spur conversation that is interesting to the community. A lot of my comments have 50+ upvotes, and I don't often get into negative votes because I try to add value + not to be an asshat. :D

Here are the HN leaders:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

[est31]

I have my account since end of 2018, and in the 4 and a half years since then I got 15k karma points, while I obtained the "first" 10k in the first two years on hn, and the 5k after that in the two and a half years after.

I think the 5k karma per year in 2019 and 2020 I got because I've commented on threads where upvoters are very upvote-happy: there are some topics where you get tons of upvotes, other topics you don't get many upvotes but instead have a high risk for downvotes, and many more where you don't get any votes at all.

Also the usual rules apply: if you are early in some thread that gets to remain on the main page, you can get some upvotes from having a high ranked comment there.

Anyways, I love this site and not for the karma but because you get to talk to people who know and/or did amazing things.

[hospitalJail]

FYI: 10000 karma / (365 * 5 years) = 5.4 karma per day

[kstenerud]

Stick around long enough, comment only on things you're knowledgeable about or have intelligent questions about, and the internet points just come up with the rations.

I basically visit whenever I'm bored or waiting for something, so maybe 20 mins in a day I guess?

[samwillis]

22k, been here since 08. a lot of of that karma in the last 7 years though. Sometimes I could be on here for an hour or so, sometimes will go weeks without doing so much as checking once a day.

It's probably directly related to how busy I am, or how interesting the project I'm on is.

Ultimately though I get far more out of HN than I put in. I've worked from home, for myself, for most of the last 10 years. HN has been my connection with with wider tech wold, and an opportunity to talk about things I'm interested in that I would be hard pressed to find people to talk to about in the local Pub.

[lucideer]

I think HN likely has a better algorithm for this than Stack Overflow (where I answered about 4 simple HTML questions 12 years ago, logged out, stopped using the site and years later realised I had racked up thousands in karma), but even so longevity is still a huge factor. I'm sure some very active new users do rack up karma quickly, but for most just having an account here for a decent amount of time is what does most of it (and being reasonably active during that time).

I'm coming up on 10 years here... I've never been a big receiver of upvotes, it's just time.

[Semaphor]

Almost 11k

Hard to say, essentially I have the tab always open as a pinned tab, and read it whenever I need to clear my mind from work stuff. But I also have been here for just over 11 years, so that puts that karma in perspective ;)

Quite some karma is posting related discussion if a thread was posted before. People appreciate not having to search or install an extension that automates it themselves ;)

Generally, most of my comments get a few upvotes, I try to always stay courteous and elaborate on why I disagree with something, if I do. Though I do know that I wasn’t such a model citizen in the beginning.

[zokier]

waay too much time. most of my comments do not garner much karma and that's okay, even then sticking around for 14(!) years has accumulated points. I guess I leave few comments every day, although there can be occasional long gaps too.

Few numbers based on search/profile: 5641 comments => 1.1 comments per day avg, 2.75 points per day, 2.5 points per comment. Looking at past year there were 670 comments, so yeah, I suppose I have become more active in the past years compared to the early days.

I don't really do submissions for some reason.

[magicalhippo]

8.9k since 2017, so getting there. All except a few hundred tops from comments.

I spend on average an hour so per day, reading the comments and sometimes commenting.

On interesting topics I can spend more, reading the article and comments which may lead to searches and such. And often it can take a while to write a comment or reply, especially if I need to do some research, like if it's some programming language I haven't used before or similar.

[danpalmer]

Depends. When I’m working in a language a that doesn’t compile or a project with fast tests, very little time. When I’m working in Java or Swift, ages.

[AndrewDucker]

I have a mere 31,000 karma, and I've picked it up over time. I go through periods of submitting interesting articles to HN, periods where I enjoy discussions, and periods when I'm too busy with two small kids and a job that engages me to spend much time on here!

I'd like to know what my highest scoring posts/comments are, and whether more of my score came from posts or comments.

[lordnacho]

I used to spend more, but I'm trying to wean myself off it. The problem is there's a lot of interesting stuff on here.

[computator]

A bunch of people are commenting here on how much of their karma comes from submissions and how much from commenting. But they are not treated equivalently for karma. Submissions give significantly less karma than comments. 100 points for a submission is worth less than 100 points for a comment.

[wodenokoto]

I have 13k. It’s not like I’m typing away constantly but my HN usage is up there with Facebook and YouTube.

But I’ve also been around (on this account) for years.

I don’t think I got my thousands of karma from few runaway successes.

Can I sort my own comments by karma?

[onion2k]

About 5 minutes * 20 times a day * 10+ years.

I mostly use HN when I'm waiting for things (meetings, people, test runs, etc.) I pretend to myself that this is actually improving my productivity.

[nsoonhui]

I don't normally comment; my points come almost exclusively from posting articles.

And I only skim top comments, maybe for only 2~3 articles in a day.

So I don't have to spend much time on HN.

[Lewton]

Submission karma >>>> comment karma, I've only ever submitted 4 articles, one hit it big, and it's a third of my karma

[avip]

6.6K. Under qualified.

All my glory from stupid jokes, never contributed anything of value here.

Read 5min/day and excluding this rarity don’t comment anymore.

[teekert]

Fwiw, if a stupid joke makes me exhale through my nose slightly faster than usual, I consider it valuable, and may even upvote.

[haunter]

I read HN through RSS (minimum 10 points) and I click on whatever is interesting by the title alone. So not so much actually.

[brightball]

Probably about 20 minutes a day. It’s part of my daily routine when I sit down at the computer to skim HN before I get going.

[adrian_mrd]

Between 20-45 minutes per day; although I am still waiting for an offer to redeem my karma for Silicon Valley VC big bucks ;)

[Havoc]

Posting - maybe 5 mins a day. Reading perhaps 20. Many days zero.

It’s a 2010 account though so many years of light activity really

[moralestapia]

For me it's not like an "investment" but a hobby, and then points just add up but idc much.

[imgabe]

Too much time some days. I don’t comment all that often though, I’ve just been here a long time.

[jFriedensreich]

the question should probably be where else they spend time to get news that they then post here. You don’t get a lot of karma with comments but with high quality original content or being early to post relevant links/news.

[georgeoliver]

What's the average karma/comment for people with 10k+ karma?