Given how many posts have no comments when one does that draws my eye a lot more than the vote counts. If there’s a nice convo going on I’m more likely to upvote that than the post itself. Sometimes I remember to upvote on my way out, but usually the conversation was the content I stayed for not the post that incepted it.

In addition to other comments, piefed lists comments from crossposts with the ability to up vote the comments but no option to easily upvote the crosspost itself.

So if the numbers are small it could be the crossposted comments getting votes.

Could be people just aren’t upvoting it, could be all the upvotes did not properly sync, or it could also be a crosspost from a different community or magazine that got the comment spillover but again, without people actually upvoting all of the crossposts.

because people comment without upvoting?

Magic internet points are less important here.

If I like, agree, or find a post informative then I’ll always give it a positive vote. Otherwise I’ll just comment to add my two cents.

Sometimes I like people’s responses to the content shared more so than the content itself, so I’ll give those a positive vote instead.

I think it takes more thought to decide whether to upvote or downvote a post than it does for a comment. A comment can be bandlimited, focused and directly or tangentially related to a post, upvoting it doesn’t necessarily imply endorsement/validity of anything other than the specific content of the comment. Upvoting a post/link on the other hand takes a deeper consideration over the full set of things you are endorsing/validating as true by upvoting since what is under consideration isn’t a contained specific statement set in the specific context of a conversation. Consider a link to an actually halfway decent article on a very problematic website, upvoting the link becomes a quagmire of thinking through ok well maybe this article is accidentally saying something useful but what is the context here? In contrast upvoting a comment about the article that says “I agree with this article for the most part, but fox news isn’t a trustable source!” by comparison takes much less mental friction to calculate out for yourself.

Also I think the comments just tend to be very informative here, they are why I am here in the first place after all and not just going directly to where the links are posted to. Naturally this will lead me into following a conversation and upvoting/downvoting based on how I react to the conversation in a way that feels more important than the overall link because it is. The link is the starting point to a broader potential conversation and I think it is natural to be more focused on that when after all that is the entire point of this structure of social media. We would all be reading RSS feeds alone if we didn’t care about the comments.

Sometimes the post content sucks but the discussion is decent.

My personal policy is to upvote posts or comments that should get more visibility relative to other posts/comments in the same community/thread. So I might not upvote a post if there are currently other more important posts in the same community, but I might upvote comments on that post if I think they’re the most important comments on that post.

Conversation > Number of upvotes on a post. Similar to old reddit when upvotes didn’t matter as much but the information in said post did which would end up having the top few comments having more upvotes than the most itself.