For a number such as votes (or likes on FaceBook), there isn't a real need for it to be 100% accurate right now.

That probably has more to do with caching. It was one of the first times I remember an admin providing the real vote totals on a submission. :)Īlso here is a somewhat legendary thread (in the old r/theoryofreddit community) where one of the original admins, jedberg, talks about some of what I just described: Then in 2014 the admins removed the vote totals again, and made the '% like it' stat more accurate. The reddit admins said 'hey the vote totals aren't even accurate why do you guys care?' The community said 'we don't care, bring them back.' So the admins did. Now at one point a long time ago (prior to 2010) reddit removed the vote totals and the community complained, a lot. If think about the math it explains why the '% like it' stat would approach 50-55% percent for submissions with high activity. Specifically, upon triggering, the vote fuzzing mechanism worked by adding one downvote (artificially) for every up vote. From what I remember the up/down vote totals were often inaccurate - the larger activity a submission had, the more the totals would become 'fuzzed.' I used to write a lot about 'vote fuzzing' back in the day so I'll try to provide some context.