[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