

Ask PG: Why don't my votes count? - agotterer

I've been a HN member for 1492 days and have a karma of 1568. As best I can tell non of my posts or comments are spammy or flag worthy. Curious why my up-votes don't count? Was I accidentally flagged or blocked?
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JoeCortopassi
Why don't you think your votes are counting? The rank algorithm for
posts/comments doesn't have a straight correlation between the # of votes, and
placement on the page like Stackoverflow.com or something. It takes how old
the post/comment is, coupled with it's growth/momentum (i.e. how many
replies/votes a comment has had in the near past), and finally the raw vote
count. Couple this with the fact that you can't see how many upvotes other
posts/comments have, and it's easy to see how your vote may seem to not count
for anything.

Disclaimer: I don't know for sure how the algorithm works, this is just my
guess from what I've seen.

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agotterer
Because when I vote on something it's not instantly incremented (like everyone
else I know) and if I return to something 30 minutes later, it still hasn't
changed. It used to be in real time. It hasn't worked in 2-3 months, I figured
it was caching or something. But it appears its not...

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tripzilch
Why was the sibling comment here downvoted? Seems like a reasonable question,
I was wondering the same thing?

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burgerbrain
It's incorrect, you can see vote count for articles. I don't know why it was
so viciously downvoted though.

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DanielRibeiro
I don't know if that is the case, but if you vote on a post, refresh the page,
and it is not up by one, then you are in trouble. Try again, as Hacker News is
not eventual consistent, and sometimes it doesn't record upvotes.

For comments: you can see if your upvotes are being counted by looking into
the user's karma. You can't give lots of karma to one user though. After a few
upvotes to a single user, the system will stop recording them. I guess this is
a way to prevent karma inflation, and a group of friends cheating themselves
into lots of karma.

~~~
agotterer
Thats exactly what happens. I vote and nothing happens. Refresh the page, no
change. If it was just today I'd say no big deal. But this has been happening
for at least 2 or 3 months now. I've been an active member for a long time,
I'd love to continue being one...

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chc
To be clear: Does the vote arrow disappear after you click it (and stay
disappeared on reloading)?

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JoachimSchipper
You _may_ have fallen afoul of the voting ring detection scheme.

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agotterer
Any idea how to get reset? I'm sure I've voted on a few things for friends
over the years. But I would hardly call it a voting ring.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I honestly have no idea, but I get the impression that the voting ring scheme
isn't intended to be too harsh. Try giving and getting a few upvotes unrelated
to your friends?

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eslachance
Perhaps (and take this with your grain of salt) you're voting on comments and
posts that aren't actually popular with the rest of the users. If you're
upvoting comments that other people ignore or downvote, then it would seem to
you like your votes are always ignored since the posts and comments end up in
the bottom.

Again, only a theory, I mean nothing by it.

~~~
agotterer
Not the case. I can go upvote a brand new post thats only a minute old and my
vote wont be counted.

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ntoshev
Probably your votes do count, but you don't see the results immediately
because the site uses caching extensively.

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itsnotvalid
At least your post this time get upvoted.

We get to look into the source code to see what is really happening.

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joeteplow
Ha... I tried to Upvote this but my votes dont count either!

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suivix
It's because HN can only give out a certain number of votes per day before it
reaches max capacity.

