One other issue that I've noticed after looking at the leader board Sometimes controversial topics result in 'unfair' scores, but they're also very easy to expect before hand and generally if you post something controversial you'll get good enough discussion from other users that it's never a question of 'I wish I knew why people gave me that score!' which is the most frustrating thing. Even if that value is trivial (like mentioning a relevant article, or giving a brief anecdote that validates a point) it's still value. Something about the uniformity is very reassuring, unlike reddit where you need to either be in the first 5% of comments or provide something seriously exceptional that appeals to every reader to even have a chance of being listed near the top of a submission.įrom my experience the 'best' scoring comments are easy to pinpoint why they've scored well and if someone was so inclined they could very easily spend their day 'farming' karma here, but if someone were to do so they'd be benefiting the site because the only real way to obtain karma here is to provide value. I don't think I've ever posted a comment and felt that the score (or attention) didn't fairly reflect the value of the comment.

HN is slow enough and the comment listing algorithm works in such a way that if you post during the first half of a submissions life your comment is guaranteed exposure and if the comment has value it'll float to the top. The thing I like most about (commenting on) HN is that it's incredibly easy to predict if a comment will get karma or not.

World of warships karma system