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.
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.
This recalculation happened shortly after reddit went closed source. I don’t think we should trust their word that they had all of a sudden ‘fixed’ the problem, whose fix just so happened to really drive their stock value.
It’s not misleading, it’s the reality of what happened. Their public post was PR justification. It was about that point on that every decision they made was for $ and not for transparency.