HN top-100 sorted by karma per day
spreadsheets.google.com
spreadsheets.google.com
Maybe we need to find out the average point total of the top 20 comments (separately, articles) for each month before calculating anything else. Would pg or the search.yc guy(s) be able to calculate these numbers?
If a user "respected" enough to get into the top 100 is saying things that you don't want to read, there are only two real possibilities:
1. The community (or a large sub-section)is full of idiots.
2. You are the "idiot". (quotes for a reason - I'm not calling you an idiot.)
2. Can be clarified as: perhaps this is a message you need to hear/are not understanding. I always read these comments extra, in the view of bettering myself.
I find it interesting that your response is to ignore them. Why?
Generally, people who consistently spew inflammatory and poorly reasoned garbage rarely yield edifying conversation. I'd rather not waste my time.
And right now the settings are karma^1/comments^0
To generalize, one way or the other you have karma^x/comments^y which looks strikingly similar to points^x/time^y
Why not tinker with different variations until you get a couple of (probably non-integer) exponents that generate a leaderboard you think best represents the ideal character of the site, the same way you tinker with time gravity to alter the frontpage and comment pages?
It might be better to hurt the leaders based on the ratio of <=0 comments.
Rather enlightening though... I found myself instantly hitting the comment threads of users with recent comment averages > 10.
I've been hoping for such a list, because it would enable me to catch a day's top stories without having to check in throughout the day. This would help reduce the time I spend on the site...
The "best - Highest voted recent links" extends over at least 8 days. It's not restricted to the last 24 hours. (It looks like the same ranking algorithm as the frontpage with less gravity (no, I'm not going to download the source just to check that).
It is interesting that so few people contribute so much; the community feels bigger than it is. But I think it is mostly "the regulars" and the occasional random commenter. I wonder what Reddit is like.
BTW, it's weird that Google does not have a "fork this document" feature. I don't want to request write access; I just want to play with a copy for myself. (Actually, I just want to sort things.)
HN has its shortcomings but lack of avatars isn't one of them.
The quality of the postings here is of a way above average level compared with that on other sites that offer a way to discuss links related to programming and surprisingly wide area to the left and right of that.
Avatars are for people that don't want to read, the usernames are more than descriptive enough, and offer everything from mechanical fishes to Daniel B Markhams, so no lack of expressivity there.
The only people that would use avatars (I think) would be those that are normally found in troll territory.
I think that HN really rewards the time you put in to it, by loading up HN with more bells and whistles the quality is not going to go up.
Less = More.
That said, I agree that avatars are not a good idea. I like them on a lot of sites, and I like the idea of HN as a community, but it really is supposed to be all about the words. Let's keep using words.
This site appeals to the same kind of person who can appreciate the utility and straight forwardness of a command line. Conversely, I like to think the site will not appeal to those who might look at a command line and break out into a cold sweat.
In communities like /r/funny, however, there are enormous masses. Some names stand out more—I wonder if my alias there does—but that's more subjective and less of a closed-off community.
I've been a long time member of /., first as a lurker, then finally posting a bit and getting more involved, but I only know the names there when I see them, not recalling them by heart like you do.
On HN it's fairly easy to recognize on sight a few hundred or so, and to be able to recall several 10's at least, but it feels more like a 'hackers village' than a city.
Right now I figure about 7500 active users on HN, but, again, my measuring methods are somewhat approximate so take that with a huge lump of salt.
If it grew to 'city scale' (say 50K+ active members) that feeling would completely change, most of the posts would be from members that you would not recognize.
It has occurred to me that it is very well possible that PGs strategy is based on keeping HN manageable, and to ruthlessly prune that which does not belong in the hedge is a pretty good way of achieving that.
Over time the quality should go up, not down if you keep at it consistently. Hard to tell if that's happening though, not sure what kind of metric you'd have to come up with to discount for the growth of the site vs the quality of the comments.
That's a pretty subjective issue.
P-Dub was easy to notice because for a few months, every time he posted five people would reply to him telling him to do his homework. And karmanaut was similar, because his replies got such insane upvotes compared to other people. His legend was self-propagating.
S2S2S2S2S2, on the other hand, was one of the founders of SuicideWatch. Last year I made a handful of calls to local police stations when people who threatened to kill themselves were in my area. I'm still impressed that three people were able to have such a positive and widespread influence.
Or, rather more usefully, it shows you the average for comments and submissions separately.
...
"Usefully" in only the most abstract sense of the word ...
/me sheepishly gets back to work.
If you would make the ranking based on quality of postings (which I think is more useful) it would look like this:
+---------+-----------------+
| ratio | username |
+---------+-----------------+
| 15.7917 | sivers |
| 10.5652 | keyist |
| 8.4536 | pg |
| 8.4000 | justinweiss |
| 8.3203 | lbrandy |
| 8.1111 | jl |
| 7.7149 | patio11 |
| 7.7005 | randomwalker |
| 7.6548 | mdasen |
| 7.5489 | old-gregg |
| 7.2623 | mojombo |
| 7.1552 | tjic |
| 7.1143 | ironkeith |
| 7.0633 | ajg1977 |
| 6.9412 | nixy |
| 6.9394 | jcsalterego |
| 6.8571 | pavs |
| 6.5385 | thedob |
| 6.5345 | Eliezer |
| 6.5000 | malte |
| 6.4933 | niyazpk |
| 6.3125 | sama |
| 6.2870 | michael_nielsen |
| 6.2804 | lionhearted |
| 6.2759 | bentoner |
| 6.2020 | evdawg |
| 6.1639 | defunkt |
| 6.0917 | martythemaniak |
| 6.0598 | chaosmachine |
| 6.0310 | zain |
| 5.8735 | JoelSutherland |
| 5.8716 | adamhowell |
| 5.8644 | ryanwaggoner |
| 5.8364 | endtwist |
| 5.8113 | nixme |
| 5.7196 | gabrielroth |
| 5.6400 | cjoh |
| 5.6296 | tc |
| 5.5926 | curtis |
| 5.5401 | anuraggoel |
| 5.5313 | boundlessdreamz |
| 5.4784 | TomOfTTB |
| 5.4626 | cperciva |
| 5.4286 | andres |
| 5.4000 | unfoldedorigami |
| 5.3889 | kn0thing |
| 5.3783 | edw519 |
| 5.3415 | thinkzig |
| 5.2716 | raganwald |
| 5.2364 | paul |
| 5.2208 | smanek |
| 5.2105 | shimon |
| 5.1569 | bokonist |
| 5.1364 | brentb |
| 5.1277 | bouncingsoul |
| 5.0909 | mqt |
| 5.0566 | jim-greer |
| 5.0556 | mjtokelly |
| 5.0424 | pc |
| 5.0417 | crocus |
| 5.0343 | ckinnan |
| 5.0323 | dilanj |
| 5.0000 | jeeringmole |
| 4.9848 | abstractbill |
| 4.9690 | tdavis |
| 4.9569 | jbyers |
| 4.9529 | spencerfry |
| 4.9457 | absconditus |
| 4.9421 | amix |
| 4.9286 | ksvs |
| 4.9254 | luckystrike |
| 4.9245 | fleaflicker |
| 4.9167 | Mystalic |
| 4.9020 | kennyroo |
| 4.8857 | joao |
| 4.8658 | menloparkbum |
| 4.8621 | timr |
| 4.8571 | shalmanese |
| 4.8403 | marcusbooster |
| 4.8333 | jkkramer |
| 4.8188 | daeken |
| 4.8113 | TimothyFitz |
| 4.8040 | plinkplonk |
| 4.8000 | jefffoster |
| 4.7962 | acangiano |
| 4.7716 | sachinag |
| 4.7545 | halo |
| 4.7500 | lackbeard |
| 4.7491 | nir |
| 4.7486 | tsally |
| 4.7434 | shadytrees |
| 4.7429 | imgabe |
| 4.7342 | ionfish |
| 4.7301 | mixmax |
| 4.7265 | swombat |
| 4.7222 | wolfish |
| 4.7209 | kalvin |
| 4.6970 | alecst |
| 4.6875 | forsaken |
+---------+-----------------+As they say, close enough for government work. If you want more precise numbers you'd have to ask PG, I can't make them any better. Also, they lag by the time it takes for google to index HN.
The recent addition of the cutoff freezing discussions actually makes this a whole lot easier tough.
The key to the whole thing is this google query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+i...
Where you replace the 55547 with a suitable number, rinse, repeat.
http://top.searchyc.com/users_by_average_points_per_comment
Which, BTW, not only has completely different raw data, but is even more meaningless because it shows that certain famous or insightful, but rare, commenters have very high average points per comment. ;)
If you want raw data on any particular user it's all there:
You need a sample of some size in order to make a statistically meaningful statement.
Karma accumulated for posting links is almost completely meritless due to the way the site discourages editorial, is built around multiple-submission, and then gives the karma to the first past the post.
Feature request: Make the primary karma count reflect comments and text posts only, making link post karma a secondary figure.
And I fully agree with your feature request.