Ask HN: What is the average karma points of HN users?

5•EPendragon•6mo ago

Out of curiosity, how many karma points does the average HN user generally get to? I understand that the question should likely be timeframed, I.e. within a year or two. I found there is a top list, but no statistic on the average values. Also would be curious to know how long would it take on average to get to that point. I assume we are talking in years, but I could be wrong.

Comments

giantg2•6mo ago

You'd probably be better off using some sort of time adjusted metric and looking for the median. But even then, what would this information be useful for?

PaulHoule•6mo ago

I'd say "pick out a random sample of users and check their karma" but the problem is "what's a random sample of users?" You could pull all the submissions and comments from users that were made in the last week from the API pretty easily and pick out 1000 of those users (not 1000 random comments!)

Any sample of users who actually post is going to have higher karma than the universe of HN users, many of whom haven't logged in for years.

Somewhere between the time I had karma 35,000 and 60,000 I had a script that I ran sort-of-daily which captured the top 100 users including the ones who don't have a number posted on that list. I was planning to make a chart of how top user's karma was growing over time but I guess I was never competitive enough to actually make the chart.

EPendragon•6mo ago

Im curious to know what is the karma to activity level ratio for the active members of the community? Are there more people who constantly post and comment or are there more people who create rare, but high value posts that the community values and engages with?

ofalkaed•6mo ago

No clue but karma on HN is kind of meaningless and the only people who pay attention to it are the ones who have yet to realize that most do not care how much karma they or anyone else has.

zippyman55•6mo ago

I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the point systems are the wrong objective function for me so I tend to change my user id periodically to reset them. It keeps my ego away from having a high score, which is a bit of a dark pattern lock in. I do get that some people need higher scored to accomplish things, I just do not want to play.

chistev•6mo ago

I didn't know we could do that

Jtsummers•6mo ago

https://github.com/HackerNews/API?tab=readme-ov-file

You can use the API to find some of these answers.

chistev•6mo ago

Mine is currently 204

al_borland•6mo ago

My account is 3.18 years old, so I apparently average 2,111 karma per year.

I have to assume the karma ends up falling into a pareto distribution, so averages will be heavily skewed and kind of useless. Something like quantiles may be more useful.

EPendragon•6mo ago

What’s your activity like? Do you post/comment on the daily basis?

journal•6mo ago

karma is used as internal metric to prevent new accounts from going viral. there, i said what most of you don't dare.

andyjohnson0•6mo ago

> Out of curiosity, how many karma points does the average HN user generally get to?

Until you know the distribution, you don't know whether an average is informative or misleading.

My impression is that there are a lot of high-karma accounts that post quite infrequently. I think a measue should take that into account.

Ask HN: Anyone Using a Mac Studio for Local AI/LLM?

Ask HN: Opus 4.6 ignoring instructions, how to use 4.5 in Claude Code instead?

Ask HN: Ideas for small ways to make the world a better place

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

Ask HN: 10 months since the Llama-4 release: what happened to Meta AI?

Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

LLMs are powerful, but enterprises are deterministic by nature

Tell HN: Another round of Zendesk email spam

AI Regex Scientist: A self-improving regex solver

Ask HN: Is Connecting via SSH Risky?

Ask HN: Non-profit, volunteers run org needs CRM. Is Odoo Community a good sol.?

Ask HN: Has your whole engineering team gone big into AI coding? How's it going?

Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?

Kernighan on Programming

Ask HN: How does ChatGPT decide which websites to recommend?

Ask HN: Mem0 stores memories, but doesn't learn user patterns

Ask HN: Why LLM providers sell access instead of consulting services?

Ask HN: Is it just me or are most businesses insane?

Ask HN: What is the most complicated Algorithm you came up with yourself?

Ask HN: Anyone Seeing YT ads related to chats on ChatGPT?

We built a serverless GPU inference platform with predictable latency

Ask HN: Does global decoupling from the USA signal comeback of the desktop app?

Ask HN: Does a good "read it later" app exist?

Ask HN: Have you been fired because of AI?

Ask HN: Anyone have a "sovereign" solution for phone calls?

Ask HN: Cheap laptop for Linux without GUI (for writing)

GitHub Actions Have "Major Outage"

Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

Ask HN: OpenClaw users, what is your token spend?