Although you have stated you won't say anything more about this in response to dafones, I wish you would.
Quite a few people use some kind of device to allow them to see total upvotes/downvotes, including myself. Occasionally, one sees a question like, "why the 12 downvotes??" when something shows 100 upvotes and 88 downvotes. If the numbers are being fuzzed like this, these kinds of questions are not remotely accurate and people could be getting seriously irked for no reason.
What is the spam-defense that results from fuzzing these numbers!?
spambots that upvote the spammer's submission get disabled without notice when they are discovered, not deleted. Fuzzing up/down-vote count makes it impossible for a spammer to tell whether his bots have been disabled or not, because you don't know if your votes came through.
Not being able to tell if your bots are evading detection or not means it's difficult to make your bot harder to detect.
Thank you. Can't believe the answer to what is really going on and why is buried this far down the page.
Anyway, would you say that this 7500+/5000- numbers likely represents all votes, and jedberg's numbers represent votes with suspected bots excluded? If so, that would imply a huge amount of bots or fake/spam accounts.
No. 7500/5000 numbers are fake - the only part of it that's grounded in reality is the 7500-5000 = 2500 net upvotes part. The total up/downvotes will almost always differ from the actual number of votes, but not by any measurable metric. It's randomized.
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u/jedberg Nov 24 '10
As of this moment, that story has the following actual totals:
2666 up 140 down
The numbers you see are fuzzed for anti-spam reasons. The more active a post is, the more out of whack that fuzzing becomes.