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Ask HN: What is the average karma points of HN users?

5 points by EPendragon ↗ HN
Out of curiosity, how many karma points does the average HN user generally get to? I understand that the question should likely be timeframed, I.e. within a year or two. I found there is a top list, but no statistic on the average values. Also would be curious to know how long would it take on average to get to that point. I assume we are talking in years, but I could be wrong.

11 comments

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giantg2
You'd probably be better off using some sort of time adjusted metric and looking for the median. But even then, what would this information be useful for?
EPendragon
Im curious to know what is the karma to activity level ratio for the active members of the community? Are there more people who constantly post and comment or are there more people who create rare, but high value posts that the community values and engages with?
ofalkaed
No clue but karma on HN is kind of meaningless and the only people who pay attention to it are the ones who have yet to realize that most do not care how much karma they or anyone else has.
zippyman55
I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the point systems are the wrong objective function for me so I tend to change my user id periodically to reset them. It keeps my ego away from having a high score, which is a bit of a dark pattern lock in. I do get that some people need higher scored to accomplish things, I just do not want to play.
al_borland
My account is 3.18 years old, so I apparently average 2,111 karma per year.

I have to assume the karma ends up falling into a pareto distribution, so averages will be heavily skewed and kind of useless. Something like quantiles may be more useful.

EPendragon
What’s your activity like? Do you post/comment on the daily basis?
journal
karma is used as internal metric to prevent new accounts from going viral. there, i said what most of you don't dare.
andyjohnson0
> Out of curiosity, how many karma points does the average HN user generally get to?

Until you know the distribution, you don't know whether an average is informative or misleading.

My impression is that there are a lot of high-karma accounts that post quite infrequently. I think a measue should take that into account.