This is a topic that i’ve been meaning to start a discussion about but haven’t had a chance due to the level of detail i’d like to provide.

I will also be posting the current logic of how vote counts are counted and also publish the code that i use for the counting.

Without going too much into detail today when votes are counted theres a few things that the logic accounts for.

1. It only counts votes at the first level (meaning anyone that replies to a vote with their vote gets their vote discarded)
2. In the event someone tries voting more than once, only the first vote gets counted, the others get discarded.
3. Users who join after the voting post is made do not get their votes counted. You must have had your account active prior to the vote post
4. External and local users get separated and counted separately.

In the future, and this is the part i’d like to discuss more in detail on another thread, is whether we factor in someone’s reputation. Lemmy currently collects a post and comment score for every user. This score is essentially = to how many upvotes your post or comments have gotten. Additionally the number of post and comments also get tracked. I’d like to see if there would be a method to use this data in order to determine if an account should have the ability to vote. This does alienate the lurkers but they don’t typically vote anyway unless its something that could affect them.

When I have some extra time i’ll post a detailed post on this so that those of you who have an overachiever mindset can provide your 2 cents.