Votes and Comments Incongruous

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1g8y3lg/votes_and_comments_incongruous/

created by I_Hate_This_Website9 on 21/10/2024 at 19:15 UTC

10 upvotes, 5 top-level comments (showing 5)

Have any of you noticed that posts you make seem to have very few upvotes compared to the number of replies?

If you look at my account, some of the more recent posts have over a dozen comments, often either neutral or approving in tone, yet the post has half or less the number of upvotes.

I first interpreted this to mean that upvotes were being subtracted by downvotes, which confused me due to the aforementioned reason. But now I am not so sure if the downvotes negate upvotes. Perhaps users who reply simply aren't upvoting, instead? This seems unlikely, too, given that the overwhelming majority of users (oftentimes thousands will view the post if the analytics are to be trusted) do not interact with the post at all, and I would think that if one were to go through the effort of commenting, then they would likely up or downvote the post as well.

Have you noticed this in your or other user's posts? What is your explanation?

Comments

Comment by traumatic_enterprise at 21/10/2024 at 19:33 UTC

8 upvotes, 3 direct replies

I've noticed some subreddits are stingier with upvotes than others. In some subs people upvote everything to the moon; in others, there will be hundreds of comments but nobody's upvoting or downvoting anything. I can't explain it beyond just the culture of each sub being different.

Is that maybe part of what you're seeing?

Comment by Kijafa at 21/10/2024 at 21:01 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I first interpreted this to mean that upvotes were being subtracted by downvotes

That's how the voting work on reddit, unless I'm misunderstanding your comment. Your total link score is upvotes minus downvotes (with some fuzzing/obfuscation when numbers get higher). I would guess your posts have less points than comments because you've posted in subreddits with high per-user engagement, but lower total users. So your posts don't get seen by many users (hence low upvotes) but are engaged with heavily by the users who see it.

Comment by burningpopsicles at 22/10/2024 at 10:19 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I am that person you are talking about 😂 I love having conversations on here but I always forget to do the voting thing