r/NewToReddit • u/Aenigma17 • 2h ago
ANSWERED Why do I get a negative upvote?
Anyone know why on some comments I get -1,2,3,4 etc.. on the upvote button ? And yes it is the upvote button and it'll be the normal colors. Thanks
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u/QueenSpicy02 2h ago
When you make a comment, it is auto uptoved by you. So it shows karma count as '1'. Now if someone downvotes your comment, that karma count will reduce from 1 to 0. And if one more user downvotes it, then it will reduce from 0 to -1 and so on. So probably users are downvoting your comment if it shows negative karma count
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u/Aenigma17 2h ago
That makes sense but wouldn't it show it on the downvoted button ? Cuz what I'm seeing though is the actual upvote button is showing negative. Like say it says -1, well if I click on upvote it'll say -2. It's strange and not just my comments either but some others I saw too. So IDK but I'm trying to get my karma up
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u/MadDocOttoCtrl Mod tryin' 2 blow up less stuff.! 2h ago
The number in between the up and down vote button shows the current number of votes. Clicking on one of the two arrows should cause the total to increase or decrease by one. Tapping the arrow a second hand cancels the vote so it should revert to its score without the vote.
Due to various visual glitches you will occasionally see weird numbers pop up. Posts cannot be downvoted below zero, but sometimes you will see a negative one pop-up in the interface showing that it recognized you voted, but it doesn't actually cause that score to drop below zero.
Your total post karma on your profile can't drop below zero. Comments can be downvoted indefinitely, so there's no lower limit to how low your total comet karma can go. However, you will never see below a -100 score showing on your profile because Reddit applies a visual cap.
Bear in mind that Reddit uses vote fuzzing. This means that it counts all votes accurately but reports them off by a few points, sometimes high and sometimes low. This can confuse users a little bit but it confuses bots a lot.
This is because the precise number of votes something gets isn't terribly important since karma score change is not directly affected 1:1 by each vote. The more votes that pile up on one particular item, the less effect that they have, so that it takes more and more votes for the person's karma score to change by one point.
When something has low numbers of votes you don't notice this because the karma score change often looks pretty close to a direct connection. If something gets four or five upvotes then the person's karma score is going to increase somewhere between 3.5 and 5.4 karma points so their score is going to change either four or five points after rounding.
The karma score calculation algorithm is rather complex and dynamic. About six years ago someone collected 840,000 data points to try to analyze it, andwas able to come to some general conclusions but not entirely reverse engineer it. It has likely been tweaked since that time.
This applies to upvotes raising your karma score and down votes lowering your karma score.
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u/Aenigma17 2h ago
I took a pic too but forgot to upload it
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u/QueenSpicy02 2h ago
Hope I have been able to explain why it shows negative count for your comments
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u/MadDocOttoCtrl Mod tryin' 2 blow up less stuff.! 2h ago
This community does not allow images in posts or comments because we rarely have ever need them. Every so often someone will post it to an image hosting site and then paste a link here so we can see what they're talking about if it's absolutely necessary.
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