What does the visible score represent vs. the underlying raw votes?

When you look at a post or comment on Reddit and see a number like "247" displayed next to it, you are not seeing the true, exact net count of all upvotes minus downvotes cast on that content. What you are seeing is a number that has been deliberately altered by Reddit's vote fuzzing system, which modifies displayed vote totals by a small amount each time the page is rendered. The actual underlying raw vote tally — the genuine arithmetic difference between all upvotes and all downvotes — is stored internally but is intentionally obscured from public view. Reddit has confirmed that the displayed score is not a precise representation of raw votes. The fuzzing typically shifts the displayed number up or down by one or two points, but the distortion can be larger on certain posts. If you refresh a post multiple times in quick succession, you may notice the displayed score changing slightly — going from 248 to 246 to 249 — despite no one actually voting in that window. This is the fuzzing system in action, applying a randomized adjustment each time the page loads. The upvote percentage, displayed as something like "94% upvoted," is also subject to rounding and approximation rather than precise calculation. It gives a directional sense of how the community received the content but should not be treated as an exact figure. For most practical purposes the percentage is a useful signal — you can reasonably interpret "94% upvoted" as broadly positive — but you cannot calculate the exact split of upvotes and downvotes from it with any precision. The karma you receive from a post or comment is derived from the underlying raw vote data, processed through Reddit's karma algorithm, not from the fuzzed displayed score. This means that even if the displayed score seems static or round, the internal counters are still working accurately, and your karma reflects the genuine vote activity on your content rather than the obfuscated number the public can see. For most users, this distinction rarely matters in day-to-day use. You can treat the displayed score as a rough directional signal of how well content was received without obsessing over the precise number.