the value of upvotes decay logarithmically over time in the Hot and Active views. new posts and comments have quite a bit of an early advantage, and since upvotes decay, popular old posts and new posts are on roughly equal footing in the Hot and Active views.

here is the algorithm, where R is rank, s is score (number of upvotes - downvotes), and t is time since posting in hours

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path: 0 159606, hotness: undefined, score: 15, children: 0

Saturdaycat 9 points 3 years ago

It makes the person who commented feel actually heard, imo. It can be nice to see that someone read your comment and agreed

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path: 0 161598, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0

themobyone 6 points 3 years ago

I don't think it has any effect beyond showing other people appreciated the post. And I've read somewhere around here on this site, that not having "karma" associated with each account help prevents bot and faming accounts.

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path: 0 159597, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0

tallwookie 4 points 3 years ago

there's no fake internet points like karma, but the voting provides weight to how the data is sorted when viewing multiple community's posts at once. of course if you access the community's content directly through that community you'll see everything there regardless of the positive/negative votes on it.

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path: 0 160311, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

KilgoreTrout 2 points 3 years ago

The mlem app shows a “karma” score — both for me and all of you lot.

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path: 0 170166, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1

Lionir 2 points 3 years ago

Really? I wonder where it gets that information from... Is it just doing the math for all the posts on someone's account? I'd think not since that'd be pretty slow.. Do you have any idea how?

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path: 0 170166 174841, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0