They changed the algorithm on Dec 7, 2016.
Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20161206000344/https://www.reddit.com/
After: https://web.archive.org/web/20161208000333/https://www.reddit.com/
Best guess, based off the vote count differences of those two days, is that if you see a vote with 100,000 count, it’s likely closer to 20,000 count (divide by roughly 5 or so).
There was a post about it by KeyserSosa on Dec 6, so it’s not some conspiracy or anything.
I figured YSK.
Yep I remember. Its an estimate…kinda. there were many reasons given but at the time it felt bad. Like they were trying to hide the counts…which I still think they do.
I think the given reason was to prevent vote manipulation by fuzzing the counts or something like that, but I always to took it as the admins and supermods cherry pick which posts they want to promote and alter the counts, so basically pushing certain messages and politicking.