They changed the algorithm on Dec 7, 2016.
Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20161206000344/https://www.reddit.com/
After: https://web.archive.org/web/20161208000333/https://www.reddit.com/
Best guess, based off the vote count differences of those two days, is that if you see a vote with 100,000 count, it’s likely closer to 20,000 count (divide by roughly 5 or so).
There was a post about it by KeyserSosa on Dec 6, so it’s not some conspiracy or anything.
I figured YSK.
I was there Gandalf…
Before that date their algorithm was soft-locked to around 5k upvotes. If a post was extremely, massively popular it would climb to maybe a bit over 10k but that was insane. There was clearly a logarithmic scaling effect that kicked in after a few thousand upvotes. Not entirely sure why, perhaps to prevent the super-popular stuff from ballooning in some kind of horrible feedback loop.
The change was to uncap the vote counts. One day posts just kept climbing well beyond the 5k mark. Now what they also did was recalculate old posts in order not to fuck up the
/toprankings. Kinda. Took a while and I’m not sure they got to every post.I don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation, but this ain’t proof and I don’t see how it is unbelievable that a website with tens of millions MOA would occasionally have a post with 100k+ upvotes.
Yeah, OP’s post is misleading. Back then, they announced that they will make that change in how votes are displayed.
So they literally did the opposite of what OP is claiming, they started showing real numbers. Those numbers don’t seem unrealistic at all to me. Reddit is one of the most popular websites, and the nature of the frontpage will just mean that posts that reach the top will have huge amount of votes.
I don’t know why are we still talking about reddit here. I’m pretty sure everyone who is here, already hates it.
I use Reddit and Lemmy and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I don’t really understand people who treat them as mutually exclusive.
I try to treat them as mutually exclusive as in I try really really hard to not use or browse reddit unless absolutely needed. Instead channeling whatever interaction I do into lemmy.
You ever hear of voting with your wallet? Well on the internet you vote with your attention and interaction. Whatever site you use and contribute to inevitably grows in content value from your discussions (if you are one of the few who actually post and writes well thought out comments).
Im a prideful nerd who believes people should be willing to sacrifice convinence or protest against something indefinitely if they really believe in the cause. Theres many parts of lemmy I don’t like but its core tenants of decentralized federation and non-profit community operated social internet services run with open source software speaks to me enough.