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View submission: The NewToReddit Encyclopaedia Redditica v2
There isn’t a 1:1 relationship between votes and karma. It might appear that way especially at the early stage of your Karma count and the early stage of your post or comment, but that isn’t the case. Reddit uses a technique called Vote Fuzzing for several clever (and a few mundane) reasons.
Vote Fuzzing is an automatic process built in by Reddit that slightly changes the vote counts on posts and comments each time you refresh the page. It prevents spam because people trying to use upvote/downvote bots will have no idea if the bot is working or not.
Want to see this work? Try this yourself: I upvoted a random post, and it showed three upvotes. Then I refreshed the page and it showed four upvotes. Then I refreshed again, and it showed two upvotes. That's Vote Fuzzing in action. It's explained in the Reddiquette[1] pretty well too: *Some up/downvotes are by Reddit to fuzz the votes in order to confuse spammers and cheaters[2].*
1: https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/eaqnf/pardon_me_but_5000_downvotes_wtf_is_worldnews_for/
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/p8t966/reddit_and_karma_explained/h9sqcti/
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