Ask HN: Does Karma affect the rank of a submission? I understand that going to the 1st page of HN needs people to upvote but does Karma affect the ranking.
e.g. A & B shared 2 links at the same time. A's account (10 Karma) shared a link, got 100 upvotes within an hour. B's account (2000 Karma) shared a link, got 100 upvotes within an hour. Will B's link get a higher rank on the top page? |
In my experience, story quality plays a big role and luck a somewhat smaller one. Because what makes a story good on Hacker News can be a bit different than what makes it good on other sites someone with 2000 karma is probably more likely to submit a better story -- e.g. right now this submission about a fourteen year old Linux text book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11352295 is on the front page -- simply based on the likelihood of greater engagement and more experience.
My observation is that many stories that get 100 upvotes in an hour generate low quality discussions and disappear due to flagging, though there are exceptions.
My unsolicited advice is to write good comments and post good articles and not get to tangled up in trying to optimize around timing.
Good luck.
And not all upvotes are equal. The software has voting ring detection that is good, but not perfect. Submissions often get quite a lot of upvotes that don't convert to karma for the user simply because not all upvotes are regarded as "genuine". Those upvotes might not count towards the submissions ranking, but I don't know.
What I do know is that there is "secret sauce" and that it's generally pretty good, although not perfect. Trying to game the system is rarely successful, and trying to understand it from the outside is going to be really hard.
Personally, I submit stuff I think is going to be of interest, I read stuff that looks like it might be interesting, and then I walk away. The internet in general has taught me not to care.