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Ask Hacker News: Economics of Karma Points

3 points by Kaizyn ↗ HN
How much has the worth of a karma point on Hacker News been inflated/devalued over time as more and more members have joined the community? I am starting with the assumption that more post or comment viewers translates to more upvotes per comment on average. It is entirely possible that this is incorrect. Still how would one go about doing this kind of math calculation?

5 comments

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JoelPM
The other day I came across a comment on HN from one of the creators of Erlang. His karma is 31.

I just checked the profiles of the top ten people on the leader-board and while I'm sure they are great people who have really contributed a lot to HN, I would give more weight to a comment/posting from the afore-mentioned HN user with karma 31 than any of them. And, to be honest, I don't really look at people's karma so I'm not sure how you would define the worth of a karma point, let alone determine change in worth over time.

Kaizyn
It's simple really. If there are only 10 users on HN, then it is much harder to earn 10 karma on a post or comment than when there are 1000 users. Just like with any real world currency, the more there is the less valuable it becomes. Certainly you raise a great point about how limited in value karma is for assessing the worth of an individual's ability to contribute to any particular discussion. Still just as an inflation calculator is neat to play with every now and then, this was an interesting thought exercise - or so it seemed to me. http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
JoelPM
Interesting, you're defining "worth" as "the difficulty with which something is obtained." I agree, it is a neat thought exercise.

I was defining worth as "the value that something confers" which may (or may not) be tied to the difficulty with which it was obtained, but requires you to define value, which I have a hard time doing for Karma.

b0o
I don't know much about Karma points, but it seems that you could technically spam an old post and get 1,000 karma points in a couple of minutes, so I don't really think its worth much.

But what I like about HN is that you can read every single user's comments that they've posted and use that to vet how good of a user they really are.

Kaizyn
Unfortunately, yup are right about this. However, what I am trying to get at is the value of karma over time. When HN had 50 members, it was much harder to earn 100 karma than it would be today when it has thousands of users. Just like with money as it becomes easier to acquire something it has less value. However your point is all too valid sadly - that because karma is so easily games and has always been - there may be little point to asking such questions.