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

2 EPendragon 8 7/27/2025, 1:44:41 AM

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 (8)

al_borland · 2h 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.

zippyman55 · 7h 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 · 5h ago

I didn't know we could do that

giantg2 · 10h 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 · 10h 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.

Jtsummers · 7h ago

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

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

ofalkaed · 10h 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.

chistev · 5h ago

Mine is currently 204