Its just Reddit. They use a website script to downvote to 40% of the total upvote. So even if 10k people upvoted, an automated reddit system would create 40% downvotes or 4k.

I don't know why this is the case, but no matter what story on Reddit in all of its existence nothing has had more than 60% likes.

One would thing by the nature of things its impossible to come even close to 100%, but its well within the realm of possibility to have something liked by more than 90% of the people.

You're right. It's been said this is to prevent this very kind of vote spam because the bots won't know the right number to down vote on to bury the story quickly.

I thought I've had it explained a little different. They don't just automatically downvote, they upvote as well, keeping the difference between downvotes and upvotes as close to legitimate as possible. So assuming something gets 1000 upvotes and zero downvotes, reddit's script might automatically add 500 downvotes, but they'll always add an equal number of upvotes, bringing the totals to 1,500 up and 500 down.

This is fucked. I want to see real vote numbers.

makes you wonder how much money the FBI wastes on down voting

Entry level position is 8.50/hour for a standard 40 hour work week.

Includes a pretty nice healthcare package (Dental AND Optical!)

Starting to get signs of carpel tunnel, but I gotta eat mang.

I often wonder about the voting system here on reddit. I feel like it's being used to control the information we are able to see. I've seen some pretty important and compelling articles downvoted to oblivion on this subreddit, that just doesn't make sense.

you have got to remember, the gov hired large groups of people to post to sites like this to seed bad info or to spread disinformation to keep the population from the truth and to pose dissenting points of view to dilute political views

you need to make the distinction: there are a few different players within that group with different goals spewing different kinds of lies.

true..true...

I also like to compare the Other Discussions of identical articles. Comparing, for example, the discussions in r/politics and r/technology on the same article. It sometimes reveals which subreddits are being gamed more aggressively than others.

Also, happy reddit cake day.

Damn, that's a great catch.

Reddit fudges the vote tallies with downvotes, which makes it harder for spammers etc. The number of people who've downvoted the submission is probably a lot lower than 46%, but head to the bottom of the comments if you want to find their defense.

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Maybe they were downvoted heavily and deleted, or removed? Or maybe the downvotes were simply because subscribers hated seeing CISPA posts constantly.

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http://www.reddit.com/help/faq#Howisasubmissionsscoredetermined

It's not necessarily tens of thousands of votes, as there's no easy way to determine how many people have voted on a submission. For posts with particularly high karma the reddit algorithm tends to level out a post to around a 50% balance. So even if nobody downvoted a post, it could appear that way to most users.

I'd like to know what the admins are doing about this.

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The score (Difference between up- and downvotes) is accurate. The obfuscation adds both upvotes and downvotes at a 1:1 ratio, so it's only the percentage that's off. That however is probably off by a mile.

Everyone who is paying attention knows whats going on here lol

Either vote bots or 45% of redditors hate America.

i live in louisiana's 4th congressional district. representative john fleming has a very GOP voting record - he's all about fracking and corporate bailouts, while cutting welfare and keeping marijuana illegal. but he still voted against CISPA. i was so proud i sent him an email thanking him.

HR Gary.

Do you mean HB Gary?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBGary

I don't think the vote counts are accurate AT ALL. They may be loosely based on reality, but they are not an actual count of how many people voted. Either that or there is a massive "downvote every other submission so my spam floats to the top" issue going on that manifests itself as anything popular getting thousands of downvotes from various, non-coordinated parties.

There's no way of knowing if the up/down vote buttons are connected to the numbers at all.

If it helps, I'm one of the guys that downvotes the CISPA threads, but doesn't comment.

I'm sick of seeing the sorts of "YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE GUYS! LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD, AND TOGETHER WE WILL CRISH THE OPPRESSORS!" sentiments all over reddit. Quite honestly, no one is going to committ to activism any more active than sitting at a computer, pressing buttons, yet they don't stop whining.

This sort of invasion of privacy is wrong, but it's literally everywhere you look, and I'm sick of people screaming that the Internet is sacrosanct - that it should be the exception.

Finally, I have nothing to hide. I supported the anti-SOPA movement, because it had the potential to inconvenience me, but, honestly, I don't care about CISPA.

That is called vote fluffing and is intentional.

vote obfuscation?

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Doesn't the obfuscation algorithm attempt to make the percentage totals at least close to the actual vote pattern

No. What would the point of obfuscation be then?

Well I notice this phenomena with most front page posts. The more upvotes something has, the more the downvotes as well. And almost always with a 50-60% up vs downvote ratio.

This may be a bit off topic but it is about CISPA...of it gets passed through the Senate as well, Obama will veto it. I know most will not agree but hear me out. There is another bill that is essentially the same as CISPA but puts the DHS at the helm of controlling and regulating the functions of the Internet. Plus, it is an election year and now there has been some mention of it in the mainstream, though not as much as with SOPA. The Senate bill is currently being stalled, so I believe that CISPA will be passed and vetoed, giving Obama a huge increase in the minds of the young and tech-savvy members of society only to have a Senate bill come into legislation after the election and without and opposition. If anyone can find the time to find out the name of that bill that would really help in preparing for the future if these events come to pass.

You're fooling yourself if you think that. He's just fooling us, trying to get us not to fight cause, don't worry, I'll veto it. But then he won't. Wait and see.

I think you're right. Obama can pick up a mountain of votes in the election and then quietly pass the Senate version in November. That is the sneaky Obama style. Its kind of like a drone strike on Internet freedom

Obama only said that to take the heat off the bill, and cause people not to worry about it, thus making it easier to pass.

But there is a bill in the Senate that is even MORE nefarious than CISPA, sort of what CISPA is to SOPA. Additionally, it puts the DHS in charge of monitoring and controlling the internet. Killing multiple birds with one police state stone. Especially now that there is some buzz going around, even in r/politics about CISPA and how bad it is, it would look terrible for him not to veto it. I won't be surprised if he doesn't veto the bill and allows its passage, I'm just looking at all of the options and seeing what ulterior motives would be behind such an action, because we can all agree on they do not have our best interests in mind.