What is the average karma points of HN users?
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.
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.
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?
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.
You can use the API to find some of these answers.
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.