Tell HN: Up/downvotes of comments on HN are silently ignored when using Tor | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Up/downvotes of comments on HN are silently ignored when using Tor

7 pointsfsflover12 comments

I noticed that whenever I upvote or downvote a comment while connected through Tor, my vote is silently ignored. I still get the "unvote/undown" button, but the user karma in their profile remains unchanged. I can repeat the same while connected through the clearnet, and everything works as expected: The karma of the affected user changes accordingly. The upvotes for the stories work fine though.

Is this a new defense from bots? Why does it affect established user accounts like mine? Has anybody else also noticed this?

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Thank you for checking this!

> but the user karma in their profile remains unchanged

The karma doesn't change immediately in my experience.

But the FAQ does say some votes aren't counted:

> Roughly, the number of upvotes on their posts minus the number of downvotes. These don't match up exactly. Some votes are dropped by anti-abuse software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> The karma doesn't change immediately in my experience.

It does if I upvote from the clearnet. I have just done it, and your karma immediately increased by one, from 4297 to 4298.

I tried with yours before commenting, and it didn't update

/shrug

If I don't see the karma update immediately, then I never see it later, too.

Have you checked the network request and response? Is it as per non-tor

I didn't and I don't think it's relevant, as upvoting the stories works fine and for the comments, links "unvote"/"undown" appear reliably.

Maybe stale user profile pages are more likely to be served via Tor.

Even after I wait a couple of days after my upvoting, the user karma does not change. I can also look at the karma in the clearnet.

I am curious what prompted the pattern of behavior of voting and then checking the user’s karma.

To me, that seems like something that might correlate to questionable behaviors such as voting rings. Particularly when connected with Tor.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Tor. Just the combination of behaviors and caring about votes for others not counting enough to do an AskHN makes me wonder what the story is.

I just noticed that some comments I downvoted didn't become greyed out, even if they were very new and unlikely to be upvoted by anyone (breaking the Guidelines). This is why I decided to check that.

Also, the other way around, greyed out comments didn't become more sharp after my upvoting.

I've noticed that my upvotes and downvotes do not appear to affect comments like they used to, or at least there is now a delayed reaction to where I don't know if it's me or someone else voting.

I use Mullvad.

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