Current Events > I'm watching my upvotes on reddit fluctuate and I'm so confused

(+) Yeah! (+)

guy asked if a basic language course was enough to become fluent

I wrote the first response *and* it's the most comprehensive. It was hovering between 4 and 5 upvotes for a while and now it's down to 3 and I don't get why >_>.

edit: went up to 5 from 3
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Stop worrying about internet points. It means nothing. No one will ever remember.
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I need to know why people don't like my basic unbiased and factual answer to this person's question.

Or like

These two guys were having a side conversation about EMT and CPR training and he asked THEM if he should take this language course or not. Why not ask the guy with the top rated answer who actually talked about the language course???
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Trying to understand the internet will only frustrate you and confuse you more.
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Wish my problems were this minuscule.
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Flockaveli posted...

Wish my problems were this minuscule.

Trust me I have other problems going on, but I'm at home and it's easier to focus on something stupid like this than my greater life as a whole.
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Hexenherz posted...

Flockaveli posted...

Wish my problems were this minuscule.

Trust me I have other problems going on, but I'm at home and it's easier to focus on something stupid like this than my greater life as a whole.

Fair enough, my mistake.
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lol don't apologize, this is a really minor thing to nitpick realistically.
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It can really be any number of reasons from pettiness to just doing it for kicks I guess. Tbh I don't even bother upvoting or downvoting others as it's not something that even matters to me

Fwiw, vote counts on reddit are fluffed a bit. It could say 3 votes but in reality it's 2. They do it to thwart off spammers.
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If you are just refreshing the comment page of your profile over and over it fluxes. I think it's a glitch.
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Axiom posted...

It can really be any number of reasons from pettiness to just doing it for kicks I guess. Tbh I don't even bother upvoting or downvoting others as it's not something that even matters to me

How can you not upvote!! Or downvote... >_>

tizorres posted...

Fwiw, vote counts on reddit are fluffed a bit. It could say 3 votes but in reality it's 2. They do it to thwart off spammers.

Middle hope posted...

If you are just refreshing the comment page of your profile over and over it fluxes. I think it's a glitch.

That's weird, I'm curious how it can deter spammers since the spammers can just upvote regardless right?
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Here's an explanation from reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/1vehg6/gopro_on_the_back_of_an_eagle/cersffj

Edit - 2017/06/11 - Vote fuzzing may not work the exact same way as it did back when I originally wrote this. Back then, total votes got crushed down to smaller values so something nowadays with ~15-25k real upvotes would be crushed down to about 2,500-3,000 upvotes, and something with a total score of ~80k-120k would be crushed to about 6,000-7,000 total score using downvotes. The president's AMA for example got over 200,000 points in reality, but in the old system it got crushed down to something much lower like 14k with fuzz downvotes. I don't know if fuzzing still works the same way because it's been a very long time since we've been able to see the upvotes and downvotes on comments.

original comment:

Alright here's how it works:

Basically it only works for bots that have been shadow banned (banned from voting/commenting, but they have no idea they've been banned.) This means the bot can post, upvote and downvote all it wants but it will have no way of telling if it's shadowbanned. In fact, you could be shadowbanned right now and not know it. Until I reply to your comment, then you know you aren't shadow banned. The reason they do this is because if the bot knew it was banned, it would just make a new bot and continue exploiting. This way, the bot will keep doing stupid stuff not knowing it's been banned all along, and no new bot will replace it until it finds out.

This is where the reason for fuzzing comes in. Once the bot downvotes, reddit detects it was a downvote from a shadowbanned bot and tacks on an upvote to balance that banned bot's vote. This way, the total upvote count is totally unaffected by all shadowbanned bot votes, and the shadowbanned bots actually think their vote counted (but it did not.) This is vote fuzzing. It also randomly adds both 1 downvote and 1 upvote at random intervals so that the bot can't tell if its downvote just got upvote cancelled, or if it's just reddit doing its fuzzing. The total end count stays totally accurate, but when you see the background numbers (you aren't really supposed to be able to see the background votes) you can see the fuzzing happening.

Edit: This is also why you see almost perfectly agreeable posts get thousands of downvotes. They aren't real downvotes, they are fuzzed. It might literally have 10 downvotes, but the fuzzing will add a lot more on.

Example: A comment or post with 14572 upvotes and 11442 downvotes could very well be closer to something like 3504 upvotes and 374 downvotes. However, both values still result in the end tally of a total of 3130 up.

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