pardon me, but 5000 downvotes? WTF is "worldnews" for???
As of this moment, that story has the following actual totals:
2666 up 140 down
The numbers you see are fuzzed for anti-spam reasons. The more active a post is, the more out of whack that fuzzing becomes.
Although you have stated you won't say anything more about this in response to dafones, I wish you would.
Quite a few people use some kind of device to allow them to see total upvotes/downvotes, including myself. Occasionally, one sees a question like, "why the 12 downvotes??" when something shows 100 upvotes and 88 downvotes. If the numbers are being fuzzed like this, these kinds of questions are not remotely accurate and people could be getting seriously irked for no reason.
What is the spam-defense that results from fuzzing these numbers!?
If you have a method that always alters those number, why do you bother reporting ups/downs at all? Why not just have the total net votes?
It seems silly to me to have the "X% like it" and # of total votes in each direction if they're both complete lies.
It's interesting to me that so many people seem surprised by this. I always thought it was pretty obvious, the ~65-75% "like it ratio" is way too consistent to be realistic. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago when someone else posted a similar question.
So... I think a better way of determining what is popular or not is by a combination of how many comments, views and votes it gets, then you could probably just hide the numbers anyway and mark them in numerical order of popularity. I am not sure this system is really doing anyone justice and especially for comments, a lot of comments are being downvoted simply because people don't like or agree with the comment and not if it follows the reddiquette. I wish the comment voting was fixed for something better.
