The gist of my observations is that when people follow a direct link to a comment the downvotes affect the visible vote count and the position of a comment in the replies but they are not recorded at the account level.

I thought it was interesting, and since this sub crosslinks and gets crosslinked often I thought y’all might find it pertinent.

I noticed this when I had a post crosslinked from a meta sub awhile back but didn’t document it. Due to my habit of opening things in tabs when I woke up this morning I found that I had documented the previously observed phenomena and thought I’d share it here. I’m sure others have noticed.

The following section is for documentation and background I’m not trying to call in backup.

Using NP links SubredditDrama and EnoughLibertarainSpam linked to a comment by Slutlord-Fascist in Anarcho_Capitalism. The snapshot of the thread before linking can be found here. My specific comment was mentioned in the SubRedditDrama comment section as well as directly linked too without the use of “NP”.

Before I went to bed the total comment karma was 14,674. The comments most likely to be noticed in the thread had net karma of 0 and 1. When I woke up the comments were then at -5 and -9 with a total account comment karma of 14,679. I took a before and after screen shot of all the “active” comments and total account karma. A couple of the comments did receive a few more upvotes from other threads and I would guess that that was the source of my addition 4 account level comment karma.