I haven’t really posted a lot to r/selfhosted (or Reddit in general), but whenever I did, there was always someone who voted my post down in less than 30 minutes after it was posted. Maybe because of this (or maybe because they were actually perceived as low quality posts), these posts never received a lot of engagement with their 0 scores.
Today I’ve made a little experiment and posted the same article both here and to r/selfhosted. On Lemmy, it received a few comments and some upvotes, but over at Reddit, it was promptly downvoted to oblivion.
I’ve never really used “New” on Reddit, but I’ve decided to take a look at it, and to my surprise it looked like r/selfhosted’s New page was full of genuinely helpful posts, but I’ve never got to see them as their scores were all zeroes.
What gives?
IIRC, reddit uses vote fuzzing. I think it’s an attempt to mildly curtail the effect of bots, vote manipulation, and bandwagon effects.
In other words, don’t put too much thought into the votes on reddit. Or reddit in general, fuck reddit.
Yeah. Reddit vote scores have never been true. Don’t ever bother paying attention to them.
I hope without karma we can do away with vote fuzzing.
With how unreliable tallying votes over federation is, we’re kinda get vote fuzzing “for free” right now.