How to get karma on News.YC

Seriously, you submitted your own inflammatory tweet about karma to HN?

Jacques would have actually measured this. It's not hard; the top karma scores and their relative posting time are right there at the top of the comment.

Write the comment everyone else was coming to write. They'll just upvote you instead.

Not that karma gets you much of anything. I wish I could trade this stuff in, like tickets at the arcade.

http://imgur.com/K9F3a.jpg

There are a lot of ways to get karma:

- Be a good, early commenter on a good story. (A bad early comment might get you a ton of downvotes, and a mediocre early comment is likely to be ignored as better comments overtake it.)

- Submit good articles

- Consistently say insightful things. Even if you're not the first to comment, if what you say is really helpful, it'll rocket to the top.

Being an early commenter isn't enough. You also have to say something that someone else values. You won't get upvotes otherwise.

I disagree. Most of my karma has come from submitting good articles.

Actually, just make witty observations about HN, hacker culture, ...: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672032

Being an early commenter certainly helps, but it's not essential. HN moves a lot slower than reddit and has a lot less comments.

Running a successful VC firm or at least writing a blog about them seems to help too.

I'm not going to upvote any of these comments just to prove the theory false!

First!

I just wanted to get in early to say I agree.

EDIT: Irony is so lost on most HN'ers. Ho-hum. Go ahead and downvote away...