This is obviously an attempt to increase the quality of quality of comments, is there some type of guideline you can give about the type of comments/commenter HN is looking for? I worry that there is a karma feedback loop in action where users with higher karma are better known and naturally get more upvotes than an unknown poster making the same comment.
1000 just seems like a really high threshold that would take a very long time to reach. I'm not sure if this is desired and HN just really wants people to work for it or I just don't provide much value. Obviously I think I provide value but I haven't even reached the threshold to downvote yet and after over a year HN is putting my comments on probation? It just really seems to devalue new members, it makes me wonder if I should be posting comments at all. Now I'm going to be scared to comment since I might get stuck is approval hell. So now it'll probably take an even longer timeframe to reach 1k since I'll be posting less. I know that in some way this what HN wants, fewer fluff comments but honestly sometimes I don't know what HN is going to upvote.
Is there some guideline to how long it should take to reach 1K? I know it depends on how active you but maybe some idea of how the karma average looks for quality commenters at 100 comment intervals from 0-1k. Obviously I'll reach it at some point but that doesn't mean I provide the value HN is looking for.
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.
1000 just seems like a really high threshold that would take a very long time to reach. I'm not sure if this is desired and HN just really wants people to work for it or I just don't provide much value. Obviously I think I provide value but I haven't even reached the threshold to downvote yet and after over a year HN is putting my comments on probation? It just really seems to devalue new members, it makes me wonder if I should be posting comments at all. Now I'm going to be scared to comment since I might get stuck is approval hell. So now it'll probably take an even longer timeframe to reach 1k since I'll be posting less. I know that in some way this what HN wants, fewer fluff comments but honestly sometimes I don't know what HN is going to upvote.
Is there some guideline to how long it should take to reach 1K? I know it depends on how active you but maybe some idea of how the karma average looks for quality commenters at 100 comment intervals from 0-1k. Obviously I'll reach it at some point but that doesn't mean I provide the value HN is looking for.