On almost every other platform a negative reaction still counts as attention, and attention is what the ranking wants. Reddit is built the other way around. This page sets out exactly what one downvote takes from a comment, using Reddit's own ranking arithmetic.
The short version. A downvote is not attention on Reddit, it is subtraction, and it costs a comment far more position than the same number of upvotes wins back.
A Reddit vote arrow is a ranking control, not a reaction button
The arrows look like the reaction buttons on every other app. They are not doing the same job.
- YouTube, TikTok and Instagram rank on watch time, comments and shares, and none of those signals ask whether the reaction was positive.
- An angry comment on those platforms is still counted as a comment, so hostility feeds reach.
- Reddit is one of the few large platforms where a reader can push a piece of content down, and that push is fed straight into the ranking.
- The practical result is that a Reddit audience can bury a comment, while a YouTube audience can only ignore one.
Reddit ranks a comment by the lowest score it could plausibly deserve
Reddit stopped ranking comments by the score on screen in 2009. It now works out a range the comment's true quality could sit in, and then ranks it by the bottom of that range.
- Ranking on the bottom of the range means a comment is judged on its worst plausible outcome, not its average one.
- Downvotes widen that range downward, so each one drags the ranking figure further than it drags the visible score.
- A comment with very few votes is pushed down as well, because a small number of votes leaves more room for doubt.
- Reddit widened the confidence setting from 70% to 80% after launch, which increased the penalty carried by comments with fewer total votes.
The finding
A Reddit comment holding 500 upvotes can sit below a comment holding 3 upvotes, if those 500 arrived alongside 400 downvotes.
A comment with 500 upvotes and 400 downvotes ranks last in this group of six
These six comments are run through Reddit's own ranking arithmetic. The middle column is the score a reader sees. The right column is where Reddit actually puts it.
| Comment | Score on screen | Where Reddit ranks it |
|---|---|---|
| 150 upvotes, 10 downvotes | +140 | 1st |
| 40 upvotes, 2 downvotes | +38 | 2nd |
| 12 upvotes, 0 downvotes | +12 | 3rd |
| 3 upvotes, 0 downvotes | +3 | 4th |
| 60 upvotes, 30 downvotes | +30 | 5th |
| 500 upvotes, 400 downvotes | +100 | 6th, last |
- The comment with 500 upvotes holds the second highest score on screen of the six and still finishes last.
- A comment with 3 upvotes and no downvotes outranks it, on 3 points against 100.
- The 900 people who voted on it bought its author a worse position than 3 people did.
- Total votes are worth nothing to a Reddit ranking on their own, which is the opposite of how every feed-based platform behaves.
Every downvote also takes about one karma point off the account behind the comment
Ranking is what a downvote costs the comment. Karma is what it costs the person who wrote it, and that cost outlives the thread.
- One downvote removes roughly one karma point, under the same diminishing returns that apply to upvotes.
- Karma is attached to the account rather than the comment, so a buried comment keeps charging its author after the thread is dead.
- Deleting a downvoted comment does not return the karma it lost.
The cost
Deleting a comment that was downvoted removes the comment from the thread and leaves the karma loss on the account.
The vote count on screen is deliberately wrong, so the damage cannot be measured
The obvious response to all of this is to watch the number and learn from it. Reddit has closed that door on purpose.
- Reddit adds invented upvotes and downvotes to the displayed total, a practice it calls vote fuzzing, to stop vote-selling services measuring whether their manipulation worked.
- The number on screen is therefore not upvotes minus downvotes, and refreshing a quiet thread can still change it.
- Nobody outside Reddit can read how many downvotes a comment actually took, so the size of the loss is never visible.
- The only readable signal left is position, so a comment that has sunk in the thread is the evidence, not the number beside it.
Use Camera to Clipboard to keep a record of a thread before it is edited
Because the vote count is fuzzed and comments move as they are voted on, the only reliable record of what a thread looked like is a picture of it. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, photographs something on a phone and puts it straight onto a computer clipboard, which is faster than mailing screenshots to yourself.
- A thread photographed on a phone lands on the computer clipboard, ready to paste into a note without a single file being saved.
- Comment position changes as votes arrive, so a picture taken at the time is the only honest record of where a comment sat.
- It runs on iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows, so the phone and the computer do not have to match.
Conclusion: what a Reddit downvote costs you, in one glance
A downvote takes three separate things, and only the first is visible while it happens.
- It moves the comment down, because Reddit ranks on the lowest score the comment could plausibly deserve.
- It takes roughly one karma point off the account, and deleting the comment does not give it back.
- It hides its own size, because the displayed vote count is fuzzed on purpose.
- 500 upvotes with 400 downvotes ranks below 3 upvotes with none, so volume of votes buys a Reddit comment nothing.