[chollida1]

I really like the average points tracking in Hacker news.

Its interesting to note that some people got on the leader board via only commenting when their posts were relevant, the avg. 5+ points people and some got on their through just making sure their voice was heard, even if they didn't have anything relevant to say, the people with an avg below 3 points.

I've always treated HN's a bit differently from other message boards in that I only comment when I think I have something relevant to say, which is probably driven from the average point tracking system.

I'm actually surprised at the number of leaders with avg scores under 2. I'm guessing these people treat HN's like a regular message board and just comment on everything. The average of the top 100 seems to be 4.3 so it looks like

[DanielStraight]

I do not think this is a fair characterization. Lots of valuable comments don't get a lot of votes.

Giving feedback on a less popular "Show HN" is a good example. In most cases, you'll just get one vote, from the person who posted the story. Sometimes they don't even bother giving a vote, so you'll get nothing. If they ask a follow-up question and you reply, you probably won't get any votes at all because your comment won't be generally useful, just useful to the person with the question. For example, this series of comments, for which I received not a single vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009176

It also goes the other way... here's a comment where I received 13 points for doing arithmetic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720950 (Actually, I didn't even do the arithmetic, Wolfram Alpha did.)

[mechanical_fish]

Like anybody, I have a reflexive tendency to feel pride when a number goes up, but pride in my average-point ranking is tempered by the knowledge that it's a statistic-of-convenience. It's not necessarily there because it's worth tracking or optimizing. It's there because the laziest possible stat, "total points," which tends to scale linearly with tenure and with volume of posts, became boring. So now we also have the second-laziest possible stat, "total points divided by total posts".

I have nothing against the simple stats -- why waste time on complex pseudoscience when basic pseudoscience will do? -- but the risk is that we'll design a stats page by adding numbers one at a time, in laziest-first order, until the screen starts to look cluttered, at which point we'll pick the most promising pattern we've spotted so far and start trying to optimize it. This is a great way to generate Powerpoint slides with lines that move up and to the right, and a lousy way to measure value. The micromanagement of statistical placebos is the occupational hazard of our age, and we should try to push back.

It's easy, too easy, to game my average-points ranking. I should contribute only popular thoughts to popular posts. I should assiduously avoid commenting on anything that's not on the homepage, or replying to people who are not near the top of a thread. I should make sure to comment within the newly-arrived-on-the-home-page time window, which is presumably now measured in milliseconds. I should certainly avoid giving advice to people on Ask HN.

That's no way to live.

[tptacek]

Hopefully there's no way to live that really depends on HN in any way. :)

[ck2]

Not really. Go back and look on archive.org, I had 6 in January and it is just 2 now.

Submissions get buried quickly now because of the sheer volume.

Points are silly though. People who join today are never, ever going to catch up to someone who joined five years ago.

[chimeracoder]

> I had 6 in January and it is just 2 now.

I'm fairly certain they changed the ranking algorithm for comments around April/May. My average used to be 10 (it's 4.5 now), and this meant that I could comment on a thread and it would essentially always be the top comment, even if it only had 1 point and the comments below had more.

This created a positive feedback loop - because the top comments get read more, they also get voted up more (as long as they're not blatant trolls/spam). So once you had an average of about 6 or more, it was very easy to maintain and rack up points.

They seem to have changed the algorithm them - I remember when they did it, because I noticed the effects almost immediately (not just on my own account, but on others' accounts, like tptacek and tokenadult).

Overall, this is probably a change for the better, since it mitigates the "rich get richer" effect of commenting frequently while still rewarding people who consistently contribute valuable comments.

[dang]

That's right.