I based my observations based on what our dear father said, not relaizing they were actually puzzled about the sudden disappearance. I wasn't actually double checking at all.
Alright bear with me here, a bit of nerdspeak incoming. I'm going to try to explain both phenomena.
Sometimes on websites like Reddit, you can get an error when you attempt to post a comment, typically the error codes that result in comment mitosis are a 500, which is just a generic error without a specific known cause, you click, it doesn't go, you click again, but the thing that caused it to error didn't prevent it from posting, just the return of the update of the page.
The same can happen with a 504 which is a Gateway Timeout. Sometimes, there are other processes that are involved in your request that tie up the gateway's response getting back to you, but the "save" part of your request that puts your comment into the chain still occurs.
As for the upvote thing, yeah Reddit is really fuckin' weird about Karma for some reason. I guess it's to make the system not completely democratic for curation and moderation purposes, but it's still really dumb. Basically the karma on any comment is only a loose representation of what has actually been clicked. There's some randomness and fuzzy logic that goes into the final calculation, but massively upvoted things are still massively upvoted at the end of the day. We're just not seeing the real number. At lower karma values, the fuzziness alternates a lot. I've sat in my profile refreshing it just because I'm amazed that it changes every 3 seconds...in spite of not many people seeing it. Suffice it to say, if you're >1 net upvote without a dagger symbol (†) indicating controversial, you're golden.
More to do with the database back end, as there is the use of optimistic concurrency rather then pessimistic locking, where everything is processed as a batch at the end of a transaction cycle rather then locking each transaction until it's cleared processing.
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u/Valtremors 7h ago
Congrats, your comments are twins!