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. 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.
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[1]. 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.
From 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. Even if that value is trivial (like mentioning a relevant article, or giving a brief anecdote that validates a point) it's still value.
[1] 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.
Most of the time this is true, but I've certainly had comments like this one[1] where I thought maybe deserved some upvotes, but an order of magnitude more than what I would consider other good comments. And sometimes I post what I think is a wonderfully insightful post about how simplified memory access methods are the most important part of RISC nowadays and nobody upvotes it.
It's easy to mistakenly believe HN is meritocratic if you have enough HN celebrity for people to seek your comments out. My comments with the least thought behind them get the most upvotes. Those with the most thought pass by unseen.
It's a powerful disincentive for putting much thought into comments.
It is not only the algorithm which works so. Our brains also in a similar fashion; we first try to find out whether someone else's comment resonates with our impressions or fragments of what remains in our minds after reading the story.
So I upvoted you because you wrote first. You have to first mover's advantage. And I believe it is fair.
The first mover advantage goes beyond increased exposure. It means that one has maximumized their ability to shape the direction of the conversation in alignment with their thoughts. Because early comments are more likely to draw responses, the top poster in a thread has the most opportunity to clarify and extend their thoughts in follow-up responses.
Follow-up responses will tend to be received in the same vein as the initial post, and if the initial post gained traction the one's follow-up is likely to garner upvotes as well.
I tend to up-vote a good deal of comments, but -- like you -- I do it more the first time I read a post's comments. So, any comments written before I read it are more likely to get upvotes than any that are written later and which I see on later visits. (This is compounded by the fact that I'm trying to cut down my lurking on HN, since it's so easy to keep reading all the good stuff that other people write.)
here on Hacker News from time to time is that pg's last major change in the site code (to make comment karma scores invisible to persons other than the person posting the comment) really seems to have made a positive difference in the site. That change was quite controversial when it was made.
Site founder pg began the experiment by opening a thread, "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"
601 days ago of not publicly showing comment karma scores, but rather just letting each user see her or his own comment karma scores when logged in. That change was protested in several LONG threads in the first few months after the change, but what I noticed is that I started seeing the comments of the users from whom I learned the most, the most often, more consistently sorting to the top of threads, and on the leader board I noticed that the AVERAGE comment scores (still disclosed there) of the 100 highest-karma users began better matching who was making substantive, helpful comments as contrasted with who was making comments that were, in pg's words, "a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
A reality check on what kind of comments get upvoted is to look from time to time at the bestcomments list,
which is still not exactly really a "best of" list of HN comments, but which has converged to better quality since that software change. The user jgrahamc appears to have seen his average comment karma score rise under the new software settings, deservedly so. Other users whose comments are especially thoughtful, whose user profile pages I visit to look up their most recent comments, also appear to have gained in average karma over the last year and a half that that software change has been in effect.
good point. Now that you mention it, I actually forgot that there used to be "points". I was adamantly against it before, but now I'm used to it. I kind of enjoy it.
It would be interesting to create a separate account just to see how high I could get my "avg" metric. I think I have a general idea of what causes posts to get upvoted. But that's not my goal when I write comments.
My best posts (on QM or molecular dynamics or color theory) don't get that many points but I still write them because I feel like they are informative and somebody could get a lot of use out of them. I occasionally also write semi-controversial posts that I know won't get many upvotes, but I still feel the arguments I make can be useful to others or hopefully at least spur thought.
On the other hand, submissions remain a mystery to me. My highest voted submission (466 points on old Russian photographs) nearly slid off the new page before being caught right at the end with a surge of upvotes. However, my submission on Titan (now the world's fastest supercomputer) got no interest whatsoever, which really surprised me given the demographics of this place.
But it looks like I've got better at writing comments people vote up. Or perhaps the community has just grown and the number of upvotes has gone up for a well received comment.
Or people have noticed that you tend to write comments that are either well-designed, or that others widely agree with -- and because you've developed that brand, some people now upvote you because they recognize your name instead of anything to do with your posts.
Basically, people get used to seeing your name as one of the top comments, and upvote you more often, even if they believe your comment to be equal to others.
For me personally, there's nobody I automatically upvote. There are a few people who get the benefit of the "PG effect" in that I automatically associate their name with specific domain expertise and give them the benefit of the doubt within that domain.
What I have found is that writing comments that get upvotes provides valuable feedback about the mechanics of writing comments that get upvotes - just as writing downvoted comments provides feedback (more quickly). Writing one good comment increases the likelihood of writing another one - writing bad comments, also increases the likelihood of good comments via downvotes.
HN provides editorial feedback in a form other than LOL's - comments and votes. Editorial feedback is a proven way to improve writing, and improving writing is the surefire way to get higher comment scores.
I agree, i would be very interested to see the effect of hiding usernames (an ID that lasted only for the thread), I bet it would distribute points significantly differently.
There is also the timing aspect however; habitual commenter are more likely to be in early to a thread.
And it's much easier to get upvotes when you're one of the first posters in a comments thread -- others are more likely to upvote you instead of writing their own comment.
If you see upvotes (U) as a product of the number of people viewing HN at a specific point in time (V) and the percentage of people who will upvote the post (Q) multiplied by the number of points in time (T) during which the post is viewable, we find U=VQT.
We can increase U by posting when V is highest, by posting comments when the most people are visiting HN. We can increase U by increasing the % of people who like the post, which usually means writing a high-quality comment. We can increase U by increasing T, the amount of time the post is available, simply by posting it earlier.
It's also easier to get downvotes as the first poster.
Thus comment quality is still the long term determinate. Particularly, now that snark and meanness are less acceptable, more thoughtful comments are required.
This is why I stopped reading MetaFilter comments; it was the same people getting upvoted simply because they had been upvoted before with little to do with the quality or even correctness of their comment. If they came into a post with an opposing view than the previous posters, it all of a sudden became an apology fest and comments began skewing to that user's perspective. When I saw the effect it was having on propagating misinformation and misconceptions, I had to put the keyboard down and walk away.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't think that's always the case. Sure, I recognize names like tptacek on occasion, but I frequently read (and upvote) a good comment, and only later realize who wrote it. I've even up-voted several interesting things in the same thread because they present information well, with connections or information that I might not have drawn, and then realized they were all by the same person.
I suspect the styling on the site, which presents non-comment bits in a lighter grey color, helps to de-emphasize the authors' identities in favor of the comments themselves.
I've been here for a little while now and there are many usernames that I know, but that never influence my upvotes, it might influence how much trust I put into what is said, but not my upvotes.
If you write quality comments, karma begets more karma because you'll sort higher on the page. For example, Patio11 usually writes helpful posts, and because of his obscene karma, he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.
But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore. At least, I've pretty much stopped looking at my karma score.
Are you certain that a user's karma factors into comment sorting? It's clear that more recent comments will be sorted to the top (temporarily), but I definitely haven't gotten the impression that existing karma scores affect anything. I don't know the factors of the real algorithm.
Edit: This could be related (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), comments are allowed some time at the top before they "mature."
From what I've observed, the greatest factor in post ranking (besides upvotes on the post in question, obviously) is your karma average per post, not your total.
Also, PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.
I don't quite get what the average karma rating is...is it simply karma-per-post? Because I've seen it jump up and down (on my own account) no matter what I've posted or how little of new karma I may have gotten.
I think it's something like the average of the last 50 to last 5 comments you've made. Maybe with some outliers removed as well.
The main point is that it's not instant (i.e. your last comments are not taken into account) and it uses only recent comments, rather than over the life of your account.
As I mentioned above: PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.
>> he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.
Patio11 gets high karma for his comments because he consistently posts insightful comments and people (myself included) search out what he had to say:
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11
Sure, I said as much in my post. He writes great comments which are very helpful. Which means they always get karma. But if there is a sorting of "high karma users" to the top...it simply accelerates how quickly he get's more karma.
Patio is one of my favorite posters, I'm not denigrating him at all. He certainly deserves all the karma he gets.
As others have said, I don't believe your existing karma influences the weight of your new comments.
However, I would think that patio11's, edw519's and others' reputation attract karma more easily than the "regular" commenters. I mean that people are more easily convinced by whatever they say because they trust their reputation.
I look at my karma score mostly to notice that it changed, which moves me to look at my previous comments to see what got upvoted/downvoted and what got responded to. I kinda wish I had a feed or something for upvote/downvote/comment, but it hasn't been important enough for me to go looking for one.
Besides the tangible benefits others have mentioned, I think everyone falls prey to the desire to be "well liked". Karma means you wrote something other people liked or appreciated, so it is gratifying to watch your karma go up (because that means people like what you are saying).
Silly I know, but I also recognize that it is what made me try to write good comments when I first joined HN. Which is exactly what karma should do - make you try to be a better poster.
I'm behind jgrahamc at #29 but my results would be similar. One extra driver, though, was getting on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders was a goal a few years ago. I specifically spent more time on the site and began to submit stuff. Nothing low quality or spammy but just 'putting the time in.'
Now /leaders isn't highlighted anymore, I spend less time contributing and more time lurking. This is neither good nor bad as I am statistically insignificant in the great tide of stuff on here. But we're all motivated in different ways in different contexts and I've learned over the years a main motivator for me is credit/recognition/"glory" (and not the points per se). Now I know that's a 'quirk' of mine, I take advantage of it as a way of getting my work done and stopping procrastination, rather than trying to do well on HN or wherever ;-) Except for this comment, surely..
I drifted over to HN from reddit (and pre-meltdown digg before that). While I had previously considered reddit comments to be 'higher brow' than those at digg, I have found the gap to HN to be substantially wider. Not so much in terms of grammar nazism and semantic pedantry, but more so tone, content and comment structure.
Glib and offhand attempts at humour are not much appreciated here, even though they might contain some wit, which reddit would gobble up.
The HN audience seems to upvote comments that are analytical, insightful and informative. This takes some adjustment for reddit heroes who can reap great karma with a well-placed meme.
Because there's nothing worse than seeing 7,000 comments on a Reddit article and 99.7% of them being complete garbage. That's discouraging to a community. Why even bother posting when someone's lame joke is 347 votes ahead of yours. So I'm a complete asshole on HN. When I see jokes or one liners I downvote away. I feel guilty and sympathize for the poster but... I like the noise free environment too much. So I wipe away the tears and downvote away.
I followed your same path too. Each time I 'migrated' it was due to an extremely fascinating article and great discussion. When I went from Digg to Reddit, the article that got me was this very in-depth analysis of what the future of space 'warships' would be like. It was great fun; the author put a lot of thought into the subject, and the comments were equally insightful as to what the mechanics of turning a massive ship in space would be.
An equally good article/discussion is what led me here. Of the aggregation sites I know of on the web, this place is currently the only one that retains (for the most part) it's signal to noise ratio in the comments.
Reddit anymore, even though being subscribed to very specific subeddits, is just frustrating to use. It seems to me that the average age of the user has shifted downward as the site has grown. Couple that with a lack of moderation, and comments are all now one line, or a 'funny gif' response, which, by the way, are strictly outside of reddiquette...
> Glib and offhand attempts at humour are not much appreciated here, even though they might contain some wit, which reddit would gobble up.
Slick attempts at humor don't certainly get downvoted, they may not be the top comment. I still think that the reddit model when brought down to Subreddits still works. I am part of some very tiny subreddits and there is still a free flow of high quality information.
1 (FizzBuzz): You're responding to a strawman ("unrealistic audition programming for a live audience") and dismissing, rather than responding to the very point the article makes at great length ("Perhaps the hiring pool really is that bad"). I wouldn't have voted it down, but it's honestly not much of a value-add.
2 (Craigslist middleman): Again, I wouldn't have downvoted, but you're being assertive for one side in the debate without backing your assertion by reasoning or arguments. Also, it might just be me, but I catch a whiff of aggression in your comment.
3 (same thread): You're aggressive and you're asserting that some nefarious secrecy is going on, when no-one else has claimed that.
Granted, in both of 2 and 3, there's a likelihood of you being voted down because it's a story about an entrepreneurial guy doing well, and you disagreeing with the legitimacy of what he's doing. This is a very entrepreneurial forum, so there's a bias against that.
Downvotes which one feels are unwarranted are best considered editorial feedback. Take them as evidence that your writing did not match the expectations of the audience which received it. This may be due to misassumptions about the nature of the audience, or due to a miscommunication of the point one is trying to make. The solution to downvotes one feels are unwarranted is improving one's writing.
I apologize -- I meant "punished" somewhat poetically. I meant only to convey that HN had shunned my comments with downvotes, fading those comments into the background of the page.
The point is that I am questioning what those expectations of the audience are. If you have read those threads, preferably in context, would you mind giving me your own personal judgement about whether or not my voice in those discussions is unwelcome or should be removed from the room? Particularly when set aside those comments of mine that were deemed to be welcome?
I'm not saying punishment doesn't happen. But the relevant questions are:
How could your posts have been better written?
Was their content thoughtful enough to be worth
submitting in the first place (or not deleting
after having been posted)?
As I said, take the votes as editorial feedback, and karma as a reflection of the quality of the writing not the author.
Before posting the grandparent, I gave the links a cursory review. It was pretty clear that there was nothing outstandingly insightful about the comments. There was a bit of meanness, however. Their tone was a bit argumentative without being informative, as well.
All one can do is support their writing with effort and bounce back from mistakes and rejection as an author.
[Edit] I will add that comments do get systematically downvoted in a thread when someone disagrees. This morning, all my comments in this thread were downvoted by one, in a very short period of time. It is not unsurprising given what I compared and the entity I criticized. If I was certain I had never done the same thing, I might complain about it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864977 But I think I might have had a bad day, myself.
From my FizzBuzz comment: "I do not object to the broad points being made here." I am not dismissing anything, I am agreeing. I am then trying to add what I believe is a very important problem being missed -- that there are many valuable developers whose personalities mean they will do very badly on a timed paper-programming test in the midst of an interview. Testing of this kind is deeply unfair to them, and deceives the tester. I'm sorry if you feel that's not much of a value-add. I disagree.
Granted, in both of 2 and 3, there's a likelihood of you being voted down because it's a story about an entrepreneurial guy doing well, and you disagreeing with the legitimacy of what he's doing. This is a very entrepreneurial forum, so there's a bias against that.
It's difficult for me to imagine anyone reading those threads and missing that conclusion. It seems to me that it is the primary driver.
I'm not going to enter into a discussion that belongs on those other threads, I'm trying, as a relative long-timer to explain how I read your posts. Of course you think your posts are value adding, otherwise you wouldn't write them. I'm trying to explain why they might not be understood as such.
The fact that you write "I agree with the broad points" doesn't change the fact that your comment disagrees with the broad point (that FizzBuzz is a good and useful test). Also, the bit you quote seems unrelated to your concerns. How do you disagree with the interpretation that 40% passed the test? Any interview situation is "for an audience" and stressful. Not testing actual coding (rather that talky-talky skill) is deeply unfair to those many talented coders who are not great sales people.
For two and three, the comments are still not good ones, they're just further being ill-considered because of the bias. There are plenty of good comments that go against the bias of this site, but still get upvotes, because they're good.
I won't argue that other thread either, but we do have a good case about HN behavior that's on-topic here.
The broad point of the article was that FizzBuzz (still) reveals an amazing number of unqualified applicants. "Why, look what happens when we do FizzBuzz... You should too."
I did not disagree that FizzBuzz does that very thing. My objection was this: "Only 40% of programmers could correctly write out a FizzBuzz program on paper during our timed test in the middle of a job interview" is not equivalent to "Only 40% of applicants even have the skill to code FizzBuzz." The difference between the two is vital in a way many people here don't see, or at least won't acknowledge. That was the subject of my comment.
Maybe entrepreneurial types are fundamentally more at ease with that kind of thing than coders who aren't wired that way. I don't know how to enable you to see into that blind spot. I could try, in a meaningful back-and-forth with those who disagree with me. But to simply dismiss my initial objection outright, as something that doesn't even belong in the conversation? To employ HN moderation that sidelines it so it won't be seen? That leaves nowhere to begin.
I value being able to argue with intelligent, tech-minded people who disagree with me. It matters so much to me that there be an online venue like HN to meet unfamiliar points of view, to test my own biases, to figure out how I actually see things by engaging in meaningful debate. But we can't have such a low tolerance for disagreement and for challenges to biases that a whiff of a problem with someone's tone makes that person's words seem "mean." We can't be so quick to silence people at square one just because we don't (yet) see their point.
Please believe me that this is sincere and not pedantic. I just want to be clear: When you compare the first set of three comments above with the second, you really see the first as more valuable to HN than the second? Let's agree that no submission or comment is going to be all bad or all good and that we won't quibble about details. On balance, you would say the second set is unwelcome when compared with the first?
> My objection was this: "Only 40% of programmers could correctly write out a FizzBuzz program on paper during our timed test in the middle of a job interview" is not equivalent to "Only 40% of applicants even have the skill to code FizzBuzz."
OK. You made that point very poorly. I only understood that now. Also, I disagree, but that's offtopic here.
You were not downvoted because you made an unpopular point, or because people disagrees with you. You weren't "silenced". Understand that. There is an extremely high tolerance for disagreement here, but it has to be well phrased and well argued.
You were downvoted because you made your point very poorly, so it read like an argumentation-void grasping at a strawman. I'm completely willing to accept that wasn't how you meant it to come out, but it's your responsibility, and only yours, that your comment comes across as intended.
I never responded to the first three comments - they were upvoted because you hit a popular vein in that particular discussion. That's pretty common. By the way, here's one for challenging the bias on this site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4827567 - it's got 53 points. It's not a particular well written or insightful comment, it's a fairly trivial anecdote that happens to contain the magic word "YC". It's probably one of my all-time highest scoring comments, to think that means it's the best depresses me. A lot.
Don't do that. First, I've done many comments that get a single downvote to 0. Typically, it's a little controversial/against the grain, and it gets the "disagree" downvote. Those are typically voted back up to 1 pretty quickly (I also make a point of upvoting posts that have clearly been disagree-downvoted, even if I wouldn't otherwise have upvoted it).
Second, there's the point of HN karma, especially of the magnitude that can never reach the leaderboard, is completely worthless. I'm sure being on the leaderboard (ie. minor HN royalty) can open some doors, if you want it to, but yours and mine never will.
To be a contrarian I'll say that jgc's blog is representative of the "new journalism" that puts pageviews uber alles. In particular, I think jgc is more interested in exploting the hacker news community for traffic than in good writing.
It's true that jgc writes a lot, but I'd say his average article is pretty average. His best articles are great, but it seems somehow he manages to score a run for a blog post that's really worth a ball or a single. It's hard not to believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.
> It's hard not to believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.
Take that back. It's not true: I have no voting ring for my posts.
And here's some data to back that up. According to the HN Search API I have submitted 373 items that are posts on jgc.org (out of a total of 670). Of those the following karma has been gained:
Points Number of posts
1 81
<5 102
<10 32
<50 74
<100 47
<200 6
<500 31
So, 215 posts out of 373 had less than 10 karma. Only 37 posts out of 373 had > 100. So, as you say, some of my posts (about 10%) are greatly appreciated here, but most are not. No voting ring needed.
All those posts account for 12,624 points of karma (from my total of 18,119 points obtained from submissions, not comments). So 56% of my submissions were for my blog and resulted in 70% of my submission karma.
I think you just said his average article is average, and his best articles are great.
If I had any articles that are great, I'd be very happy indeed. I might even submit everything I wrote, just to let the community decide which are great.
I think this shows a real problem with karma - submissions are worth shitloads more than comments. There are already multiple people on the leaders list for nothing more than spewing out generic tech sites.
If you want to see how much is linked to content quality and how much comes from having a well-known account, perhaps it is time to open another. Posting high-quality stuff from another account should yield the same results if that is the only signal used when people up vote things.
Getting karma by post describing how you got karma? Nice move... (guess, I won't get much karma for this comment)
And in fact as I can see there's no much use in HN karma - smart comments are more useful. At least, they can do you good when you apply to YC (that's what PG says at least :)).
I voted the article up not because of its subject matter, but rather for the thorough way in which he analyzed and presented it. It was a notable amount of effort to collect the data, and it takes some skill to put it together in a way which one can derive meaning from.
He then proceeds to do exactly that, and give us all a good tactic for increasing our karma: Post Consistently Interesting Stuff over a Long Time. Sure, we all read that and think, "_duh_, of course that's how to get it", but it's nice to see that there's data backing it.
Well, I understand that hackers are a bit like scientists - they like to have proved data (by the way, I'm more like a humanitarian who believes his feelings and intuition).
And I understand your reasons and they're quite good. I don't think that it's a bad article to vote up - moreover I like the article too. There's some "pure math" magic in it that I also like (although I'm a humanitarian as I've mentioned before).
I'm willing to bet that short attention spans play a significant role in making karma less meaningful - in the sense that it can penalise more extensive and thorough comments in favour of short, snappy one- or two-liners.
Take the following scenario: you've got some interesting topic that most HN users will click on, and the #1 comment is like this:
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If you're in that jittery state of mind when you just want some infotainment without reading dozens of lines of dense and subtle text, isn't it more likely that you'll just read the reply to that top comment first, since it's short and snappy? It may even make you feel that you've made progress towards understanding what the parent comment was about, without actually spending the required amount of time on it. Topics on HN obviously have a strong bias towards solid intellectual content (and I don't necessarily mean academic topics), so it's probably unlikely that much insight can be gained from very short comments - unless the poster is particularly observant and skilled in condensing information, of course.
That's just one of the reasons why I'm sceptical about karma. I think it does serve a purpose, but if the majority of users go into a topic with no real intention to read or comprehend anything thoroughly, karma becomes a less meaningful measure of contribution.
Reddit suffers heavily from short attention spans, mostly in the popular subreddits (/r/pics, /r/funny etc). There are still some long comments that rise to the top, but most of the time it's a joke or reference. Much like the content.
I think people put too much weight on things like this.
I've been on message boards for over 12 years. People know me because of my name and what I contribute, my karma (which we don't have) or likes or friends don't matter.
There are a couple of awards. One is the ability to downvote as well as upvote. That comes pretty early. The second is the ability to change the color of the stripe at the top of the page (for your own, logged-in views).
(def update-avg (user)
(= (uvar user avg) (comment-score user))
(save-prof user))
; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.
(def comment-score (user)
(aif (check (nthcdr 5 (comments user 50)) [len> _ 10])
(avg (cdr (sort > (map !score (rem !deleted it)))))
nil))
More than that. [EDIT: When I wrote this, jgrahamc's comment said only "IIRC the HN algorithm removes outliers". Since then he's added much more. But I don't believe in deleting comments merely because edits to their parents have made them less valuable.] The "average" in the HN profile is something along the following lines: take the 6th to 25th most recent comments, throw away the one with most points, and take the average of the others. So it ignores old comments, it ignores very recent comments, and it ignores some kinds of outlier. Oh, and it's only actually recalculated every few days.
Personally I don't much like this: average karma is a fairly good proxy for what I want to be optimizing in my HN participation, but the way HN reports it more or less pessimizes it as a feedback tool for me. (I'm a fairly infrequent and "bursty" commenter; HN's reporting of average karma isn't up-to-date enough to tell me what HN thinks of what I've been doing recently, nor is it long-term enough to tell me what HN thinks of me overall.)
The right answer, of course, is not to care much about karma. This is made easier by the fact that the correlation between HN karma and my own judgement of comment quality is weak, and I'm arrogant enough to think the latter is more accurate.
I've noticed that the average only updates sporadically - maybe every few days - not after every post. That obviously could have led to the numbers not adding up, in addition to the outliers being tossed, as mentioned by another commenter.
Regarding average karma per post, I happily tote a ~2.5 while still hitting a spot the leaderboard. I could drive up my average number by picking stuff I could be certain the community wanted to see, but I purposefully submit things that I think are contrarian or otherwise overlooked. I think pushing our collective comfort zone is worth it.
maybe another factor to consider (and don't take this as a critique) might be your user name. I doubt few people actually confuse you with pg. nonetheless I believe it's a name that sticks out given the prominence of the name graham on this board - and as a result your user name might be easier to remember.
Posting a popular article link can earn hundreds of karma points without much effort, whereas you would have to spend a lot of time writing many insightful comments to get the same karma. Comments also carry the risk of downvotes.
I've been curious (I don't advocate trying this) as to how possible it would be to create an account for the explicit purpose of farming karma (for the minimum amount of effort) and what strategy would be best to achieve this.
Submitting random articles from favorite sites (TechCrunch, Ars Technica, TorrentFreak, etc.) as soon as they're published (i.e. before anyone else), would probably get you a few thousand Karma points in a month or two.
From my point of view however, getting good points on a comment is a lot more satisfying and worthwhile than your general Karma count (once you're over the various thresholds).
It's actually the prince. The once and forever king is timing.
If you get pithy, insightful, argued, or just convenient comment in on a top story before it becomes a top story, you'll see an order of magnitude more points rolling your way than if you contribute research or elucidation in a day-old thread. A similar situation happens with submissions - you need reasonable content, but it can die with 1 point if the timing or title don't hit the sweet spot.
In all seriousness, I really wouldn't worry about it at all.
If you're not just being yourself, asking questions with candor when they come up, and chipping in with answers when you can, you're going to miss the point of HN.
I agree, but I also think it's a tricky subject. Doing things for the sole purpose of increasing your karma would probably be considered a negative behavior. On the other hand the community gives karma to reward behavior it approves of (and vice versa), so it isn't right to completely ignore it either.
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[1]. 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.
From 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. Even if that value is trivial (like mentioning a relevant article, or giving a brief anecdote that validates a point) it's still value.
[1] 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.