There's something about the numbers I can't figure out. Look at the top three HN contributors by karma[1]:

      username    words       karma
  1.  tptacek     4,310,896   416351
  2.  jacquesm    3,841,209   237961
  3.  ingve       2,273       215283

How did ingve get to #3 with just 2 thousand words, whereas tptacek and jacquesm authored 3-4 million words? Looking at his 14-year history, it's true that he hasn't written that much. I suppose one possibility is that his writing is 1000x better at earning karma. But I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the quality of his 3-4 submissions per day that brings up his karma when one of his submissions is a hit (I think that submissions do count toward karma).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

▲ ChrisMarshallNY 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think the majority of folks get their karma from submissions. I believe that some people are quite good at anticipating which submissions will be productive (which is also something that LLMs should do well).

I’m a freak. Most of mine is from comments.

▲ Bengalilol 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Globally, karma comes from submissions and writing comments.

4 minutes later ...

    1. dragonwriter 4 785 959 words
    2. tptacek      4 310 896 words
    3. jacquesm     3 841 209 words

I don't know why you got ingve, their global rank is now 79469 / 774235

▲

mysterypie 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was looking at rank by karma (not rank by word count):

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

	▲	Bengalilol an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry for my confusion. On average (as of last 6 months, didn't check further), he has roundly been submitting 100 links per month.

▲

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲ sothatsit 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Could it be that ingve has submitted a lot of links, but has not made that many comments?

▲ exagolo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I believe Karma solely comes from upvotes for comments minus downvotes. Submissions don't count.

	▲	embedding-shape an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That might be in real life ("afk"), but on HN even submissions give you karma.
	▲	Bengalilol an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Have a look at your submissions, they brought you karma. <https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=exagolo> Although nothing is crystal clear, the karma system is not 1:1 for submissions. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032> `Comment upvote +1 Comment downvote -1 Submission upvote >0 && <1 (not documented to prevent abuses) Submission downvote not possible (only flagging is allowed)`