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I have 4663 karma after 958 comments and 21 submissions in a bit under 4 years. Out of that:

- 2908 is comment karma; 1804 is post karma. (The total adds up to a bit too much; I'm probably miscalculating.)

Out of the post karma, 1634 was gained by 5 submissions which made it onto the front page and acquired hundreds of karma. None of the posts I submitted, including those, were written by me. (I'd like to start a blog, but I'm too lazy and shy for now.) And in my opinion, the value I contributed to the community simply by submitting them is rather low; considering that I've frequently tried to submit a story I found especially likely to generate interesting HN discussion only to find it already submitted, it's more likely that I won a race. On the other end, it's well accepted that whether a post manages to get a few points to bring it out of /new before it gets buried is somewhat random - IMHO some of my other submissions were just as good, but they didn't bite for whatever reason - making the correlation between value and post karma even more skewed.

- The comment karma histogram is a bit less lopsided: my top 100 comments (i.e. the top 3%) are responsible for about half of it (1469). But on the other end, 48% of my comments ended up with 1 or 2 points; while many of my comments are bad, I suspect that the difference is more about being seen than the top rated comments being that much better than the 1 pointers.

Also, if you sort by comment length, which is to some extent a reasonable proxy for quality, only 537 karma was earned by the top 100. Many of my top rated comments are relatively simple rebuttals to (in my opinion) bad comments; in my opinion, these can be valuable (since articulating why a comment is wrong is much more useful than simply downvoting it, and most comments never get responded to), but aren't as valuable as the long ones.

It probably doesn't help that (I think) I'm much more likely to respond to other comments (and try to have a discussion, the very thing that this change makes difficult :() than to comment on the post itself.

In my not-so-humble opinion, if you have the time and volubility to constantly make long, good comments on popular posts, you'll be rewarded. But if you don't, because the vast majority of comments will net you nothing, you'll get more by optimizing for quantity and being first to the scene, hoping for a small number of posts and comments to semi-randomly get a large fraction of the karma, than pre-selecting for quality.

Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like how Y Combinator makes its money.

Oh, and submit a lot of posts.



Thank you.




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