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.
This recalculation happened shortly after reddit went closed source. I don’t think we should trust their word that they had all of a sudden ‘fixed’ the problem, whose fix just so happened to really drive their stock value.
It’s not misleading, it’s the reality of what happened. Their public post was PR justification. It was about that point on that every decision they made was for $ and not for transparency.