"Alphabetical privilege", nice. As someone who's surname starts with AB I would also call it "alphabetical curse". E.g. back when I was young when teachers would describe what to do then often would call each pupil up alphabetically to do it, and I was always first, and most of time had not actually listened to the instructions...

I was in the same boat. It took me a long time to realize that it was better to set "the bar" rather than meet or exceed "the bar."

I think you are right (although I now wish I had not abandoned my old account). However, I have always felt that karma systems are too biased towards old users who had more time to accumulate karma. If only the karma system had some "aging" of results built in, like the tennis ranking system.

And I am only partially saying that because I have a new account here.

It looks like the tennis ATP ranking mostly drops rank points 52 weeks after they are gained.

HN karma is not publicly associated with dated posts, (I think only the account holder can see that)

But account creation date and total karma are public, so some derivation is possible.

Something like:

ranking_periods = number of 52 week spans in HN account lifetime

avg_k_per_rp = Accumulated (total) Karma / RP

Living Karma = AK - avg_k * RP

Curious if this makes sense / there are better ways to do it w public info.

If the private info were avail, it could drop karma from archive link comments, etc.