Ask HN: For users with 10k+ karma, how much time do you spend on HN?

For me it's not like an "investment" but a hobby, and then points just add up but idc much.

Depends. When I’m working in a language a that doesn’t compile or a project with fast tests, very little time. When I’m working in Java or Swift, ages.

FYI: 10000 karma / (365 * 5 years) = 5.4 karma per day

When I was back in college it was something like 2-3 hours a day (one can only pay so much attention to their professor’s wildly incorrect understanding of how C works…). I have more places to split my time these days so I probably average 10-30 minutes, with high variance depending on how busy I am on any given day.

I just buy my karma from dang. YC is obviously having some hard times at the moment so it's a win-win really.

I didn’t pay attention to karma for a while then started using it as a proxy for whether I have comment replies (like Reddit’s orangered mail icon).

I haven’t counted my comments, but I expect that I spend 20-60 minutes per day and maybe read 25 articles and comment on 10 a day.

I cut out next about 5 years ago and spend much less time on Reddit now that they got rid of their old mobile site. So this serves as my news substitute and “community” and market research for work (to learn about new data and tech software and companies to try out). And I don’t use any social media.

It does take mental energy to read and discuss, but that’s where I choose to focus and think it’s worthwhile. I find it better for mood and would just get angry after using social media or reading rage news, so this is a way to charge up and learn not only from the topics but from the thoughtful comments.

I first used the internet in 1994 and was a bit late for the well and early online communities, but I like the idea of people connected together working on a common good. HN isn’t that or anything but I feel like there are others with a similar mindset.

Hardly any. I dip in from time to time.

I tend to only comment on things I'm knowledgeable about or have reflected on, or that overlap to my experience. As such the comments tend to be relevant and to some degree insightful, and they get upvotes.

I'm not really aware of karma until someone IRL knows the site and is shocked by the number being high.

There's little worth in the karma. This morning I read a really insightful comment by someone with barely 600 karma (noticed as I was trying to figure out what they might be working on it interested in that gave them the perspective/experience). High karma doesn't feel valuable to game.

Between 20-45 minutes per day; although I am still waiting for an offer to redeem my karma for Silicon Valley VC big bucks ;)

The first rule of karma: don’t care about karma ;)

That said I got around 14k and I’m not spending an awful lot of time on HN on a regular basis (less than an hour daily, passive, reading). Posting, like now, is something I maybe do weekly.

But I’ve been here for years. Small upvotes over time do count.

I don't normally comment; my points come almost exclusively from posting articles.

And I only skim top comments, maybe for only 2~3 articles in a day.

So I don't have to spend much time on HN.

Stick around long enough, comment only on things you're knowledgeable about or have intelligent questions about, and the internet points just come up with the rations.

I basically visit whenever I'm bored or waiting for something, so maybe 20 mins in a day I guess?

I have 15k karma (!) and I guess I spend more than an hour a day reading stuff around here.

But I think the time doesn't matter at all, as a large part of the karma is just a few links that got popular. The rest is having frequented the site for a very, very long time :)

EDIT: and of course, I don't think internet points do much good, I would not object to hiding it completely.

Probably about 20 minutes a day. It’s part of my daily routine when I sit down at the computer to skim HN before I get going.

Depends on the week/day. Sometimes I don't have much going on so I'll spend a day bouncing around between HN/Youtube/outside world, some weeks I'm super busy and I have no time, some months I don't load HN. However, I'm not sure HN karma is primarily about the time investment. To me it's about only submitting things that are decent and only commenting when I have something valuable to say. I have two criteria: I'm an expert in the thing being discussed, or, I can spur conversation that is interesting to the community. A lot of my comments have 50+ upvotes, and I don't often get into negative votes because I try to add value + not to be an asshat. :D

Here are the HN leaders:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

85537 karma in 16 years. It’s the years that made the difference.

Most of my karma is from submissions. I don’t get involved in discussions often.

eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36067490

the question should probably be where else they spend time to get news that they then post here. You don’t get a lot of karma with comments but with high quality original content or being early to post relevant links/news.

I’m curious what the distribution of karma is on HN, but I haven’t bothered to write a polite scraping method of reading through user’s profiles to grab counts that’s only a little more GET-y than just a human reading HN yet.

I’ve been curious about this for a long time though, already having pulled statistics like distributions of GitHub followers and stargazers.

    sqlite> select count(*), sum(karma > 5000), sum(karma <= 5000) from users;
    558905|2018|556887

    sqlite> select percentile(0+karma, 99.64) from users;
    4952.0
    sqlite> select percentile(0+karma, 99.65) from users;
    5070.50800000003

I think HN likely has a better algorithm for this than Stack Overflow (where I answered about 4 simple HTML questions 12 years ago, logged out, stopped using the site and years later realised I had racked up thousands in karma), but even so longevity is still a huge factor. I'm sure some very active new users do rack up karma quickly, but for most just having an account here for a decent amount of time is what does most of it (and being reasonably active during that time).

I'm coming up on 10 years here... I've never been a big receiver of upvotes, it's just time.

11k. I visit a few times a day, for the last 12 years. I rarely comment or post, and ~10% of my karma is from one front page post, and likewise the rest of it is heavily skewed towards a few popular posts / comments.

I used to spend more, but I'm trying to wean myself off it. The problem is there's a lot of interesting stuff on here.

Other than the karma requirement for downvoting, are any HN algorithms driven by karma scores? I don't know what karma gets you here.

About 5 minutes * 20 times a day * 10+ years.

I mostly use HN when I'm waiting for things (meetings, people, test runs, etc.) I pretend to myself that this is actually improving my productivity.

22k, been here since 08. a lot of of that karma in the last 7 years though. Sometimes I could be on here for an hour or so, sometimes will go weeks without doing so much as checking once a day.

It's probably directly related to how busy I am, or how interesting the project I'm on is.

Ultimately though I get far more out of HN than I put in. I've worked from home, for myself, for most of the last 10 years. HN has been my connection with with wider tech wold, and an opportunity to talk about things I'm interested in that I would be hard pressed to find people to talk to about in the local Pub.

Submission karma >>>> comment karma, I've only ever submitted 4 articles, one hit it big, and it's a third of my karma

Posting - maybe 5 mins a day. Reading perhaps 20. Many days zero.

It’s a 2010 account though so many years of light activity really