Very cool. I made the top 1,000 too.

It would be interesting to see karma-per-word, as well, as a kind of succinctness density factor. Although karma points are not equivalent to quality, and you’d need to also factor in average comment length and some other things.

To use myself:

31,273 karma / 351,012 words ≈ 0.0891 karma per word

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pjc50 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

#33 here. I have written .. a lot of words. I don't know whether they're correctly excluding ">" quoted words though.

A quirky feature of HN is that you can only see detailed karma counts for your own posts. One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary.

	▲	embedding-shape an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary Seems simple enough, while searching I came across this snippet you can paste in the console, and gives you a sorted list of most upvoted/downvoted comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107028 Sadly requires hitting news.ycombinator.com rather than the API, but only way to get the actual points as you mention.

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thomasfromcdnjs 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

+1 and also add a feature for unique words to show how you vocab ranks

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latexr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You also get karma for submissions, so that metric will be highly skewed.

The submission karma is public, so you should be able to subtract it, but that karma doesn’t seem to be the same as the one for comments (i.e. I think one point in a comment gives you one point overall, but on submissions you need two or three points to earn one in your account).

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keiferski 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I started to think out what you'd need to actually get a "succinct but high-quality" score and it gets complex, fast. Karma will be bloated by popular hot takes and submissions, for starters. Then you have to determine the certain cut-offs to ensure that someone with 10 comments of 10 words each (with 100+ karma each) isn't "the most succinct."

I'm less interested in the idea as a ranking, and more as a way to evaluate my own writing, with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible.

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-]

> with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible

You're assuming "high karma = high quality" which, isn't always correct :) I've had wildly incorrect claims be upvoted a lot, and correct ones downvoted, seems to be more about what the subject is about and what "side you're coming from" rather than anything else sometimes. Other times it goes exactly as expected.

End effect is, I wouldn't rely on karma as a signal for quality, just "agreement at large" or something.

	▲	keiferski an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No, I mentioned in the grandparent comment: > Although karma points are not equivalent to quality, But I don't think they are totally uncorrelated to quality, either. So you'd need a way to factor karma points in without over-valuing them. To really get specific, the only thing we're really measuring here is something like, well-written, succinct comments that are appreciated by HN users that are able to upvote. Which is not exactly super useful or insightful, but is a fun exercise.

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kqr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting. I'm at 18,176/392,187 ≈ 46 millikarma per word. I did not expect any of those numbers to be so high.

But at almost 90, I have to ask: do you have a blog I should follow?

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keiferski 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks, no I have written various substacks and little blogs over the years, but I really ought to just make a personal blog and put them all there. +1 for the reminder.

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Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Author here. That's actually why I had written this for myself (although compared to you, my karma's comparatively low)

I felt as if I had written quite a lot on HN and I was always referencing my past comments. I just usually write what I am thinking so I do have quite a filler words in my HN comments, but still, I wanted to see how many words have I written in the first place & I wrote this thought in another comment & thought that its pretty interesting, let's do it. Maybe others would be curious too :)

But essentially, some part of me wanted to write blog too to quickly reference it and be part of the indie-web.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46828331

This is something that I wrote in that comment

"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.

Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"

So you aren't alone in having the procastination around making a personal blog. This is literally why I had made this idea so if this project (or discussion) helps you in making a personal blog & helps atleast a single person (meaningfully). I would consider my project to be success :)

Have a nice day and good luck for your personal blog!

	▲	keiferski 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Aha, yeah I have dozens of text notes on my computer that are just links to a HN comment with "expand on this as a full post." I definitely feel like I've written at least 50-100 decent blog posts as HN comments over the years. And thanks!

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KolmogorovComp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It would not make much sense to compute it, if you do not subtract the karma earned through submissions.

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genewitch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1500s with 221k, so there's a real long tail

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atoav 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or 89 milikarma/word. That is pretty good. I only got 34 milikarma/word.

	▲	MrGilbert 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		83 milikarma/word. That's interesting, though I'm not sure what to do with it.