what might also be interesting is to see how karma is accrued.. from a huge number of submissions, or from a large number of insightful comments, or what the breakdown is..
for example, i've made two submissions, both making it to the #1 spot, and have been afraid to submit any more lest my streak be ended
some measure of quality over quantity would be nice :)
I think he means more "Total Comment Karma / Total Comments", to see if the top users get, say, 3 karma per comment, but average 20+ comments/day. Or if they post relatively few comments, but really high-quality ones.
I am not very interested in karma, and part of the reason is that there is no distinction between comment karma and submission karma. I don't think that being the first to submit an interesting link should be comparable to being the first person to submit an interesting comment. But that's because I come here for the discussions. I imagine that people who come here for new links and never browse the discussions feel differently.
This is something that it would be interesting for these guys to separate out. There are clearly a number of accounts which just submit everything from various 'known to hit' blogs/sites, there are some that submit what ever was a high scoring article a year ago, Etc etc.
What I find amusing is that since they are essentially playing a game "karma scoring for fun" they complain about it when someone else's submission of the same story gets more karma than they got.
That said the use of a mechanism like karma points to drive user engagement and participation is pretty classic. You could ask someone to spend hours day scouring the internet for interesting stories but they would want you to pay them. Offer up karma points to the people who find the cool stories and suddenly they are competing for free to populate the news feed for your site.
Yes you are correct. Most of the posters on that list are very prolific posters. It's relatively easy to get karma if you spend 10 hours on HN and immediately submit the latest breaking news or post 50 posts a day.
A top list of average karma per post would be a better metric(assuming it doesn't count karma for articles).
About half my highest-karma comments have been pithy dismissals, humorous asides, planting flags on hot-button nontechnical posts, etc. -- insubstantial stuff.
I wonder how much of the karma for the insubstantial stuff is actually a response to not being able to down vote.
When you can't down vote, seeing a reply that sheds new light, puts some of the ridiculousness in context, or just takes a person down a notch may get a vote because it's your best way of voting by proxy.
For the comment writer it's a bit of a double edged sword. Sometimes the feedback you get relative to the time and effort put into a post can be disheartening.
I asked to get taken off the leaderboard! It's frankly embarrassing. Obviously, my karma score doesn't mean anything anymore; it's a function of name recognition, of the fact that I happen to post in a style (rambling paragraphs) that HN rewards, of the fact that I comment a lot, of the fact that I try to keep myself confined to topics where I have a lot of background knowledge, and of the fact that people follow my comments.
There's nothing to learn about me at all from my karma score. From my comment frequency, sure: you'd learn that I comment a lot. I don't IRC, I don't game, and I no longer blog; I treat HN like I used to treat Usenet. Also, we hire from HN, and so I have a Pavlovian thing going on with commenting.
Every once in awhile I consider switching to "tptacek_" or something, but that's just giving the embarrassing karma score more power over my life.
I liked Slashdot's approach to this, which was (when I was there) that above a threshold your score just became "Lots".
If you're counting imaginary points on the Internet you'll always be disheartened.
HackerNews has never been about Karma for me. I'm here for educated discussion. As soon as this site ceases to be the forefront of intelligent technical discussion on the Internet, I'll bounce, but I care much more about discussion than Karma, which is worth reiterating.
Karma has no value, but the strength of your arguments carry weight.
>If you're counting imaginary points on the Internet you'll always be disheartened.
I see a number next to my name, the points are real. Not imagined.
However I see the points as like video game scores. They are not terribly important even among ordinary issues, but still fun to keep an eye on once in a while. It's neat but not important.
Some days, I am above it. Others, I am working it. And sometimes the meaning I attach catches me unaware.
A few months ago, I was dead dog down. Two projects had gone to shit, an out of town trip got cancelled, and I was enduring some wanton meanness along one vector of my social life. I was having a particularly bad day. And as stupid as it sounds, seeing a bump in points at the end of the day was hugely positive. All the other shit was bigger and more important. But in the moment, those few points had more value...and then I realized how much I love my family and friends and karma points faded back to normal.
Karma scores embody whatever meaning we attach to them. For me, that meaning varies over time.
Karma is social validation. It's a sign that others are reading what your write and find value or agree with it, and why would we be posting observations and information if not for others to read?
Of course, karma is not a particularly precise way of determining what others think of you, but then again, that's fairly common as far as methods of social validation go.
Richard Feynman wrote a book called What Do You Care What Other People Think? I think he wrote it because he likes to tell stories, not for social validation. Although I'm not sure of that ... now I'm confused.
It's not a dichotomy. I'm sure he did like to tell stories; and he also liked them read, otherwise he wouldn't have published them. And is it particularly hard to believe that he also enjoyed knowing that others read and enjoyed his books? People don't always do things for just one reason.
And social validation is not a bad thing; I mean, why would it be bad to feel better about yourself for knowing that others enjoy and appreciate what you did?
Most money nowadays is just some records on some databases. I certainly don't keep more than maybe 30% of my paycheck in physical cash at any point in time.
Can the Karma indicator be turned off? I would be just as happy never knowing my number. I certainly don't know it on Slashdot but I enjoy posting there as well.
My concern with these imaginary numbers is people game them all the time which in turn makes me chuckle every time I see my "score"
> If you're counting imaginary points on the Internet you'll always be disheartened.
I'm not counting them, HN is and displaying them to me.
"I deliberately avoid calculating that number, because if you start measuring something you start optimizing it, and I know it's the wrong thing to optimize." —pg (emphasis mine)
Based on some experience with clan gaming back in the day, if you're counting imaginary points on the internet and you're doing really well it's difficult to describe it as disheartening.
This was a very helpful concept to learn and explain to my kids. Understanding the shape of a power law graph will help you not be taken in by misleading graphs; like wealth distribution graphs.
Is there any evidence that wealth distribution follows the power law outside passing the 80/20 rule? The charts of wealth distribution in the US when there aren't huge bins doesn't really look like a power law.
"At the end of the 19th century, economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that wealth among a population is not normally distributed. Rather, it seemed to have the form of a power law P(k) ∼ k−γ.
Figure 2a shows the distribution of wealth in 2011 among the richest people in the US in a log–log plot. The distribution is quite skewed and somewhat resembles a power law. It also illustrates that the richest man in the US, Bill Gates (rightmost data point), is about 30 times richer than the average of the next 400 fabulously rich Americans. It's natural to view such a skewed distribution of wealth as both unethical and unjust.
The difference between the normal distribution of length and the power-law distribution of wealth is precisely the skewness: If Bill Gates were a length, he would measure more than 300 miles from head to toe. How can the occurrence of that extraordinarily broad distribution be explained?
In the case of wealth, one can seek an explanation in terms of human economic actions and greed. That approach seems fine at first. But the same broad distribution was discovered early in the 20th century to represent town populations in a country (figure 2b). In the case of towns, population growth, commerce, and migration are among the factors likely to shape the distribution. Power-law distributions appear in other diverse settings and, as is the case with wealth and town size, have seemingly disparate causes.
Species among genera (figure 2c), which should have something to do with biological evolution.
Word frequency in a novel (figure 2d), which should have something to do with how you write a book or how the human language arose and developed.
Surnames in a country (figure 2e), which should have something to do with the country's society and history."
I am currently taking a course from Coursera. In the discussion forum karma/reputation is the sum of the square roots of comment scores - thus the scores are closely tied to consistent and less skewed by homeruns.
Then again, as part of YC, encouraging homeruns on HN implements symmetry.
There is an art to crafting posts that will mine the most karma. There are even some easy ways to quickly mine for points with low-value posts. I'd personally prefer if everyone would just post thoughtful comments, and try not to lose their sense of humor.
Definitely. I notice that since I tend to be a reactive poster, where most my posts are responding to some other comment or expanding on a point that it's much less likely I'll get views and votes since it's it relies on the votes of the parent items for whether it's towards the top of the page. Also, I don't submit much.
I imagine posting quickly at the top level of a hot topic in a polarizing, but defensible (don't be definitive, or at least leave the door open that you may be incorrect) way will get you a lot of votes. Those that agree will up vote, those that disagree will respond.
I can't bring myself to test this because I'll know I'm just doing it for points, so I continue to mostly respond to others (as here).
>I can't bring myself to test this because I'll know I'm just doing it for points, so I continue to mostly respond to others (as here).
Why not? I've run some of these little experiments myself. Aside from the ethical breach of performing amateur psychology experiments on unwitting subjects, what's the harm? You don't have to adopt the model to all of your future posts. Do it for science!
Well, to clarify, my normal posting style is semi-similar to what I laid out. I try to always allow for the case I'm incorrect, since personally I believe absolutist statements about relative matters to be of little use.
That leaves root level posting and polarizing comments. Neither in itself a bad thing, but I find them generally time sensitive. By the time I see and read a post, my sentiments have usually already been expressed, and adding what's essentially a duplicate post seems counterproductive for the community, no matter how productive it would be for my karma. :) Anything extra I would have added works well in a reply to the similar comment.
As for polarizing opinions, those come when they come. I'm not willing to manufacture any when they aren't my own. I see my online persona as an extension of me, not some mask I put on so I can adopt other characteristics. I would feel just as bad as if I had lied to someone in real life.
All that said, if I was more in the habit of having a few drinks before or while reading HN, I'm sure I would have reams of data to play with. ;)
Actually, that would be a fun experiment. Have two accounts. One used exclusively while sober, the other exclusively while slightly buzzed or more. Maybe multiple accounts for different drugs of choice, although increasing consumption just to provide roughly similar use times may yield negative consequences...
Do you think it's better to be polarizing or crowd-pleasing?
I've noticed that if you want to criticize someone/something, it's safer to aim for some defenseless individual, rather than a famous company like google. I got down-voted for criticizing google, even though I'm pretty sure nothing I could say could hurt google's feelings.
Crowd-pleasing is just positive feedback, not usually a good thing in a discussion. Polarizing comments, tend to shunt discussion off into a particular direction therefore distracting from other points of discussion. Either are great for karma whoring, but not usually great for increasing the quality of a debate.
I agree that polarizing comments may detract from a discussion, but I also believe they may serve a useful purpose, which is to more clearly define general sides of an argument, which can then be easily used to individuals to define their particular stance. E.g. I believe/am an X, but with caveats Y.
I always feel like people will remember my name and what I've done. If I do something "wrong" (make a faulty assumption and get called out, for example), I'll take a break from HN in the hopes that people forget about me and what I've done. I then ease myself back into the discussions.
Yes, it's weird and I know I'm not interesting enough to have people know me by name. I've just had a few incidents where people have tracked through my comment history and brought up things from the past to defeat me in an argument, and I get a little gunshy.
It can be humbling to be reminded of some of the dumb things we've said and forgotten. I say enough dumb shit that I had to get over myself a long time ago. I once had the good fortune to make an ill-conceived sarcastic comment in reply to something Jamie Zawinski had said in a forum, back when I was in college. To make matters worse, I was responding to a comment he'd made a long time prior to my comment, making myself even more of a doofus, and giving jwz more powder to use against me. I probably don't have to tell you that jwz excels at eviscerating uppity undergraduate know-it-alls with wit. I don't even remember what either of us said, and I am afraid to look. I just remember that he didn't disappoint.
If you're actually worried about that, it might be time to get out of the pool.
It was only about 6 months ago that I even figured out where my karma was displayed.
Post, or don't post, but do it because you think it's interesting, or relevant, or it's Tuesday, but you really shouldn't spend your time worrying about a made-up number.
I'm fascinated by the psychology behind online rating systems.
Honestly, they are big motivators for me. I get a burst of endorphins when I receive many Facebook "likes" or upvotes on HackerNews. When I am ignored or downvoted, I feel as if I've been voted out of a digital democracy.
What's interesting, though, is that many online rating systems aren't democracies; they're dictatorships. In other words, it's unclear to the user how the process of ranking / rating actually works. (HN is pretty transparent, I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this regard.)
> "HN is pretty transparent, I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this regard."
Don't you mean vice-versa? Facebook is completely obvious, and HN is the one that isn't at all. On Facebook I can easily see if I have 5 'Likes', which 5 people 'Liked' it. On HN, I have no idea why/who/where/etc the up-votes are coming from, or how they are weighted in various ways based on who actually up-voted you. It's the opposite of transparent. It's just a number with an up and down arrow. With Facebook, there is obvious measures by seeing the number of comments (and by who), the number of 'Likes' (and by who), and so forth. Not sure I follow your logic on that, unless you just accidentally reversed your sentence.
EDIT: I was thinking more in terms of "Upvotes/Likes". I see what OP might mean now from the standpoint of Facebook logic on what content you actually see, and that side of things.
HN is open source. Do you want to know how posts rise to the top? Go read the code. Do you want to know how Facebook determines what content you see? You could be a criminal, a felon, if you try to find out their algorithms (how do you do that, hack their servers?).
I'm not the OP, but that might be the direction the original logic was going.
Ah, okay. I suppose I mis-read what he meant by that statement. I see what the OP might mean now when you bring up the Facebook logic on what content you see, and that side of things. I was thinking more in terms of "Upvotes/Likes".
HN is not open source. It may have been at one time, but that ship has long sailed. We have no idea what code may have been changed, and how things are weighted differently. Presumably, there's a reason Paul no longer wants it to be open source.
>I get a burst of endorphins when I receive many Facebook "likes" or upvotes on HackerNews. When I am ignored or downvoted, I feel as if I've been voted out of a digital democracy.
Same here, I laugh at myself because of it and usually try very hard to avoid pandering to it. Is it a form of narcissism? It causes me to question my personal autonomy.
you're trying to fight your nature. People who didn't care for the group's approval were more probably to be banished from the tribal cave and thus die alone in the wilderness. Thus we are descendants of the ones who cared a lot about getting group's approval and avoiding its disapproval. With tptacek leading the pack.
P.S. I will always be behind one person who has the same join date I have, namely patio11, in both daily karma accumulation over time and total accumulated karma. And very deservedly so. I go looking for patio11's comments
I disagree. I think that's not one of tptacek's better comments. He uses ad-hom to support his (probably correct) evaluation that the person/subject of the OP was not notable enough for a Wikipedia article. While ignoring / distracting from the more important points about very real problems with the administration of Wikipedia. The mere fact that many of the proposed additions to Wikipedia are junk is not proof that all additions that get deleted by admins are junk. To his credit, at least he boldly confesses in that post to being a ranting windbag (his words). And to be clear, the real problem in this particular case is not with tptacek's comment, but that HN'ers probably just blindly upvoted his post because it was his, or because it appealed to their own bias, not because it was any good.
I think the comment is good because it responds to a frequent misconception about Wikipedia seen here on HN (I am a Wikipedian of several years' experience, and I have to live with those issues), not at all because tptacek (who has also been a Wikipedian) posted it. I would have upvoted that comment for its little-known (here) content no matter who posted it.
It's a fair point that there have been other comments in other threads about Wikipedia here on HN.
>You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules.
Ad hom: Person objects to treatment they receive from Wikimods, therefore they must lack experience.
Ad hom: List of articles for deletion containing articles that are all obvious junk. Implies that all deleted articles must therefore have been junk. Maybe I have inferred too much here, but that's what I thought you were going for, and you have a point. There are probably a lot more pages that need deletion, but it doesn't support the infallibility of Wikimods or refute the validity of some of the complaints made by people about Wikimods. I have no idea if you culled the list, but that might make it worse depending upon what you culled.
It's nothing worth getting our knickers in a twist for, and I guess I should disclose that I have created/edited a few Wikipedia pages myself and often found that experience, and working with some others on the site to be frustrating. I'm not talking about vanity pages for my friend's bands either. So I may have developed a natural reflex to unreserved or what I perceive to be unjustified defenses of Wikimods.
Respectfully, I think you're wrong on both counts.
The first is an attempt at drawing a correlation. "When you observe fact-pattern X, you can expect that property Y obtains." It might be derisive, but it's not AdHom. He's not using an unrelated character assassination to discredit an argument. I concede that it smells a bit ad-hom-y, but only because he has a lot bad to say about the article (all of it supported, imo), and so it kind of builds up momentum. That's the article's fault, though, for being so wrong about so much (although the article is right that WP is a complex (social) system, not perfectly documented).
(A related mistake, which I don't think you're necessarily making, is that of thinking that anything that attacks credibility is AdHom. If you say "Bob is always wrong about biochemistry, so he's probably wrong about this claim about haemoglobin", that's not AdHom either.)
As for the second, your inference might have been reasonable (if uncharitable), except that he later explains exactly why he brought it up: the AfD process has to operate at scale, it's not expected to be infallible. Combined with his other points about how notability has to work, it's build-up for his paragraph that starts with "Anyone who can snark... betraying a deep ignorance ...".
And I think it's a pretty decent comment, overall, because it has a virtue I prize, of looking at a wrong-but-seductive view, and giving enough additional context to help readers form a better picture. Though of course the magnitude of the upvoting depends on name-recognition.
Personally, I know I am not too interested in this. I have seen somewhere upwards of 100 posts up voted on snowden to the front page, yet only about 5 with new content. Point being, although you can get a lot of up votes by posting "hot" topics, I know for a fact there are interesting (many times more interesting) posts that never make it near the top posts.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I generally don't look at people's usernames. When I do its usually only to see if it matches the name of the submitter.
Do people really judge here based HN micro-celebrity-ness?
86 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadfor example, i've made two submissions, both making it to the #1 spot, and have been afraid to submit any more lest my streak be ended
some measure of quality over quantity would be nice :)
Why doesn't HN distinguish between Link Karma and Comment Karma a la Reddit anyways?
What I find amusing is that since they are essentially playing a game "karma scoring for fun" they complain about it when someone else's submission of the same story gets more karma than they got.
That said the use of a mechanism like karma points to drive user engagement and participation is pretty classic. You could ask someone to spend hours day scouring the internet for interesting stories but they would want you to pay them. Offer up karma points to the people who find the cool stories and suddenly they are competing for free to populate the news feed for your site.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=tptacek&s...
A top list of average karma per post would be a better metric(assuming it doesn't count karma for articles).
14 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5646078
6 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633037
I'm not saying karma is worthless, but high-karma comments are skewed by jackpots obtained from fluff.
When you can't down vote, seeing a reply that sheds new light, puts some of the ridiculousness in context, or just takes a person down a notch may get a vote because it's your best way of voting by proxy.
For the comment writer it's a bit of a double edged sword. Sometimes the feedback you get relative to the time and effort put into a post can be disheartening.
Bots these days. :D
EDIT: Oh no, my karma superstardom!
There's nothing to learn about me at all from my karma score. From my comment frequency, sure: you'd learn that I comment a lot. I don't IRC, I don't game, and I no longer blog; I treat HN like I used to treat Usenet. Also, we hire from HN, and so I have a Pavlovian thing going on with commenting.
Every once in awhile I consider switching to "tptacek_" or something, but that's just giving the embarrassing karma score more power over my life.
I liked Slashdot's approach to this, which was (when I was there) that above a threshold your score just became "Lots".
Bot or person, I find his (their?) comments insightful though I don't follow explicitly.
I thought I was doing well with 10/day (recently, not lifetime), and I'm not even on there.
HackerNews has never been about Karma for me. I'm here for educated discussion. As soon as this site ceases to be the forefront of intelligent technical discussion on the Internet, I'll bounce, but I care much more about discussion than Karma, which is worth reiterating.
Karma has no value, but the strength of your arguments carry weight.
I see a number next to my name, the points are real. Not imagined.
However I see the points as like video game scores. They are not terribly important even among ordinary issues, but still fun to keep an eye on once in a while. It's neat but not important.
A few months ago, I was dead dog down. Two projects had gone to shit, an out of town trip got cancelled, and I was enduring some wanton meanness along one vector of my social life. I was having a particularly bad day. And as stupid as it sounds, seeing a bump in points at the end of the day was hugely positive. All the other shit was bigger and more important. But in the moment, those few points had more value...and then I realized how much I love my family and friends and karma points faded back to normal.
Karma scores embody whatever meaning we attach to them. For me, that meaning varies over time.
Of course, karma is not a particularly precise way of determining what others think of you, but then again, that's fairly common as far as methods of social validation go.
And social validation is not a bad thing; I mean, why would it be bad to feel better about yourself for knowing that others enjoy and appreciate what you did?
Bitcoin is also imaginary points on the Internet. I hope I don't end up disheartened.
I think you're being facetious, but I do appreciate the point.
My concern with these imaginary numbers is people game them all the time which in turn makes me chuckle every time I see my "score"
I'm not counting them, HN is and displaying them to me.
"I deliberately avoid calculating that number, because if you start measuring something you start optimizing it, and I know it's the wrong thing to optimize." —pg (emphasis mine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
"At the end of the 19th century, economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that wealth among a population is not normally distributed. Rather, it seemed to have the form of a power law P(k) ∼ k−γ.
Figure 2a shows the distribution of wealth in 2011 among the richest people in the US in a log–log plot. The distribution is quite skewed and somewhat resembles a power law. It also illustrates that the richest man in the US, Bill Gates (rightmost data point), is about 30 times richer than the average of the next 400 fabulously rich Americans. It's natural to view such a skewed distribution of wealth as both unethical and unjust.
The difference between the normal distribution of length and the power-law distribution of wealth is precisely the skewness: If Bill Gates were a length, he would measure more than 300 miles from head to toe. How can the occurrence of that extraordinarily broad distribution be explained?
In the case of wealth, one can seek an explanation in terms of human economic actions and greed. That approach seems fine at first. But the same broad distribution was discovered early in the 20th century to represent town populations in a country (figure 2b). In the case of towns, population growth, commerce, and migration are among the factors likely to shape the distribution. Power-law distributions appear in other diverse settings and, as is the case with wealth and town size, have seemingly disparate causes.
Species among genera (figure 2c), which should have something to do with biological evolution.
Word frequency in a novel (figure 2d), which should have something to do with how you write a book or how the human language arose and developed.
Surnames in a country (figure 2e), which should have something to do with the country's society and history."
http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/points_of_view/jus...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/11/occupy-m...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_index
Then again, as part of YC, encouraging homeruns on HN implements symmetry.
I imagine posting quickly at the top level of a hot topic in a polarizing, but defensible (don't be definitive, or at least leave the door open that you may be incorrect) way will get you a lot of votes. Those that agree will up vote, those that disagree will respond.
I can't bring myself to test this because I'll know I'm just doing it for points, so I continue to mostly respond to others (as here).
Why not? I've run some of these little experiments myself. Aside from the ethical breach of performing amateur psychology experiments on unwitting subjects, what's the harm? You don't have to adopt the model to all of your future posts. Do it for science!
That leaves root level posting and polarizing comments. Neither in itself a bad thing, but I find them generally time sensitive. By the time I see and read a post, my sentiments have usually already been expressed, and adding what's essentially a duplicate post seems counterproductive for the community, no matter how productive it would be for my karma. :) Anything extra I would have added works well in a reply to the similar comment.
As for polarizing opinions, those come when they come. I'm not willing to manufacture any when they aren't my own. I see my online persona as an extension of me, not some mask I put on so I can adopt other characteristics. I would feel just as bad as if I had lied to someone in real life.
All that said, if I was more in the habit of having a few drinks before or while reading HN, I'm sure I would have reams of data to play with. ;)
Actually, that would be a fun experiment. Have two accounts. One used exclusively while sober, the other exclusively while slightly buzzed or more. Maybe multiple accounts for different drugs of choice, although increasing consumption just to provide roughly similar use times may yield negative consequences...
I've noticed that if you want to criticize someone/something, it's safer to aim for some defenseless individual, rather than a famous company like google. I got down-voted for criticizing google, even though I'm pretty sure nothing I could say could hurt google's feelings.
Yes, it's weird and I know I'm not interesting enough to have people know me by name. I've just had a few incidents where people have tracked through my comment history and brought up things from the past to defeat me in an argument, and I get a little gunshy.
It was only about 6 months ago that I even figured out where my karma was displayed.
Post, or don't post, but do it because you think it's interesting, or relevant, or it's Tuesday, but you really shouldn't spend your time worrying about a made-up number.
That's what Facebook friends are for. And Reddit.
Honestly, they are big motivators for me. I get a burst of endorphins when I receive many Facebook "likes" or upvotes on HackerNews. When I am ignored or downvoted, I feel as if I've been voted out of a digital democracy.
What's interesting, though, is that many online rating systems aren't democracies; they're dictatorships. In other words, it's unclear to the user how the process of ranking / rating actually works. (HN is pretty transparent, I think, but Facebook is more shadowy in this regard.)
Don't you mean vice-versa? Facebook is completely obvious, and HN is the one that isn't at all. On Facebook I can easily see if I have 5 'Likes', which 5 people 'Liked' it. On HN, I have no idea why/who/where/etc the up-votes are coming from, or how they are weighted in various ways based on who actually up-voted you. It's the opposite of transparent. It's just a number with an up and down arrow. With Facebook, there is obvious measures by seeing the number of comments (and by who), the number of 'Likes' (and by who), and so forth. Not sure I follow your logic on that, unless you just accidentally reversed your sentence.
EDIT: I was thinking more in terms of "Upvotes/Likes". I see what OP might mean now from the standpoint of Facebook logic on what content you actually see, and that side of things.
I'm not the OP, but that might be the direction the original logic was going.
Same here, I laugh at myself because of it and usually try very hard to avoid pandering to it. Is it a form of narcissism? It causes me to question my personal autonomy.
Given this comment, it's apparently not working, though.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=by%3ALigh...
vs
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=by%3AL...
The user has posted only one comments in the last 21 days and the highest rated comment ever had only 8 points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720
which is very, very good.
P.S. I will always be behind one person who has the same join date I have, namely patio11, in both daily karma accumulation over time and total accumulated karma. And very deservedly so. I go looking for patio11's comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11
just in case I missed a few while browsing threads from the front page and the new page.
It's a fair point that there have been other comments in other threads about Wikipedia here on HN.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Wikipedia...
Ad hom: Person objects to treatment they receive from Wikimods, therefore they must lack experience.
Ad hom: List of articles for deletion containing articles that are all obvious junk. Implies that all deleted articles must therefore have been junk. Maybe I have inferred too much here, but that's what I thought you were going for, and you have a point. There are probably a lot more pages that need deletion, but it doesn't support the infallibility of Wikimods or refute the validity of some of the complaints made by people about Wikimods. I have no idea if you culled the list, but that might make it worse depending upon what you culled.
It's nothing worth getting our knickers in a twist for, and I guess I should disclose that I have created/edited a few Wikipedia pages myself and often found that experience, and working with some others on the site to be frustrating. I'm not talking about vanity pages for my friend's bands either. So I may have developed a natural reflex to unreserved or what I perceive to be unjustified defenses of Wikimods.
The first is an attempt at drawing a correlation. "When you observe fact-pattern X, you can expect that property Y obtains." It might be derisive, but it's not AdHom. He's not using an unrelated character assassination to discredit an argument. I concede that it smells a bit ad-hom-y, but only because he has a lot bad to say about the article (all of it supported, imo), and so it kind of builds up momentum. That's the article's fault, though, for being so wrong about so much (although the article is right that WP is a complex (social) system, not perfectly documented).
(A related mistake, which I don't think you're necessarily making, is that of thinking that anything that attacks credibility is AdHom. If you say "Bob is always wrong about biochemistry, so he's probably wrong about this claim about haemoglobin", that's not AdHom either.)
As for the second, your inference might have been reasonable (if uncharitable), except that he later explains exactly why he brought it up: the AfD process has to operate at scale, it's not expected to be infallible. Combined with his other points about how notability has to work, it's build-up for his paragraph that starts with "Anyone who can snark... betraying a deep ignorance ...".
And I think it's a pretty decent comment, overall, because it has a virtue I prize, of looking at a wrong-but-seductive view, and giving enough additional context to help readers form a better picture. Though of course the magnitude of the upvoting depends on name-recognition.
You're probably not alone. I later noticed that it is tptacek's second highest rated comment.
Do people really judge here based HN micro-celebrity-ness?