Well, you could try using capital letters - I find your slabs of words without capitals very hard to read. I'm a big disliker of caps too; in online chat I often go without, but not on HN.
Also, make people feel glad they've read what you wrote; teach us something. Give us a new perspective, ennoble our spirits, enrich our minds, be graceful and patient; show us inspiring virtue, remarkable knowledge, well-described experience. Either that or write a bot to submit news articles.
The points are a pretty accurate metric of how much someone contributes to the community. And a contribution is simply a new perspective or piece of information to add. Some specific ways to contribute are:
- Ask questions about submissions
- Assess the merit of a submission
- Describe something related that others might not know.
- Link to related and supporting evidence.
Finally, be kind and humble.... and the karma will come
I think it can really be summarized as the following: adding something to the community. It can be a new relevant story/project submission or a comment with an on-topic question/anecdote. As long as it adds something new and different,(I say different here because it can't just be a re-iteration of someone else's post, within reason) users will find it karma-worthy. Users here being users like me and probably your average user on HN.
thanks all, i should probably respond to each thread during the day to keep the conversation lively, but was too busy with work, i just got off work now and am doing a general thanks to all the responders. i thought i wrote some pretty good articles on building a raspberry pi scoreboard, it went over some design decisions and tradeoffs, and i also responded to some posts with, what i thought was well thought up. maybe i’m in the wrong timezone (shanghai), i think a forum is active during certain times and once that window’s past, nobody’s really looking at all the stale comments.
also, i think in general, article submissions get buried quickly, ask HN, show HN, url submissions, so you kind of either need to hit the right timing where your article is right on top of the stack and everyone happens to be looking at it or you have some mechanism to gain points by gaming the system with fake accounts that add karma, to me that’s not worth the trouble. obviously the content needs to be interesting, but i feel behind the curve here.
Post contrarian opinions but succinctly and with room for people to correct / refine your points ("strong opinions, weakly held"). My experience is that wishy-washy comments don't go far here but opinionated ones do, even if they're wrong.
Don't be afraid to post the first comment on a submission on the new page with the hope of kickstarting the discussion.
That said, I don't know that HN karma matters for much in the real world.
As far as time zones, anecdotally HN seems to be most active during the workday on west coast time.
agree with most of your points. i also dont think karma matters much, but i always wanted a green username. and also, how did you get 5777 karma points? i was looking at your submissions, it’s almost like mine, 2-3 points on average. this is somewhat like an seo challenge, i’m assuming your comments of someone else’s article received lots of karma.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 48.8 ms ] threadAlso, make people feel glad they've read what you wrote; teach us something. Give us a new perspective, ennoble our spirits, enrich our minds, be graceful and patient; show us inspiring virtue, remarkable knowledge, well-described experience. Either that or write a bot to submit news articles.
- Ask questions about submissions
- Assess the merit of a submission
- Describe something related that others might not know.
- Link to related and supporting evidence.
Finally, be kind and humble.... and the karma will come
also, i think in general, article submissions get buried quickly, ask HN, show HN, url submissions, so you kind of either need to hit the right timing where your article is right on top of the stack and everyone happens to be looking at it or you have some mechanism to gain points by gaming the system with fake accounts that add karma, to me that’s not worth the trouble. obviously the content needs to be interesting, but i feel behind the curve here.
Don't be afraid to post the first comment on a submission on the new page with the hope of kickstarting the discussion.
That said, I don't know that HN karma matters for much in the real world.
As far as time zones, anecdotally HN seems to be most active during the workday on west coast time.