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Quoting Discussions: Learnings and experiments (emphasis added),

For now, we have removed the Discussions downvote function and removed downvotes from the Discussions post score calculation

But I can clearly see right now that downvotes are contributing to discussion post scores... What's going on?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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When downvotes were disabled in Discussions on March 7th all discussion post scores were recalculated to exclude downvotes. The scores were accurate (only showing 0 or positive numbers) for the first few hours. However, the daily process that corrects out of sync post scores was not accounting for the exclusion of downvotes in Discussions, so later on in the day that process ran and adjusted the post scores with downvotes factored in once again. The logic for this daily process has since been updated so this issue should not recur.

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Caching.

The downvotes have been removed, but the cached scores, meaning the score you see, have not been updated. If you go upvote a downvoted discussion, all the negative votes immediately disappear.

I would record a gif of this happening, but because the gif recorder I use has decided to not behave (read: recording artefacts), here are two screenshots instead:

Screenshot showing a discussion with a net -11 upvotes

Screenshot after upvoting a discussion previously at net -11, showing a score of +2

Note that the score updated to +2 rather than +1 because the previous score was +1 -12. When an upvote was added, the score was recalculated, and because the downvotes have been removed, the score jumped to +2.

I'm not sure why they didn't invalidate the caches manually, but that's the company in a nutshell for you. There's allegedly a process that does this invalidation daily for normal posts (as a similar problem appears when serial votes are reversed), but it seems this doesn't extend to discussions.

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  • 2
    GIF like that?
    – Ghost
    Commented Mar 10 at 14:46
  • 2
    Still on strike?
    – TheMaster
    Commented Mar 10 at 15:39
  • 3
    @TheMaster yes .
    – Zoe Mod
    Commented Mar 10 at 16:00
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    Hmm.. nothing on your profile about what you're striking for... or why you haven't ended your strike(with other mods). I think if you add it to your profile rather than just the profile name, out of loop users like us can get better understanding.
    – TheMaster
    Commented Mar 10 at 16:04
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    @TheMaster I did initially end the strike, but went on a temporary, extended leave. Went back to formally striking a few months ago after the company decided to throw out more CMs (and specifically those that have been the single biggest allies for the community). I'm not gonna add anything to my profile, though, because the actual justifications to continue is regularly extended by the company's actions, and I don't feel like maintaining a list. It's primarily intended as a symbolic signal to the company anyway
    – Zoe Mod
    Commented Mar 10 at 16:17
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    that's really weird. because I vividly remember that I originally discovered the downvote change because I noticed they were not contributing to scores on a discussion that I started. then I wrote this MSO question because I noticed that they started counting toward the score on the same discussion...
    – starball
    Commented Mar 10 at 22:45

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