It’s very nice to see that X people liked a post/comment and Y people disliked it instead of just having a singular “goodness/badness” rating. It (literally, in a mathematical sense) adds a whole new dimension to post ratings and gives us a more nuanced understanding of people’s opinions. Plus, it feels a lot better to see that 5 people agreed with you and 7 disagreed when you made a controversial statement instead of just seeing a score of -1 telling you how bad you are.
They fuzz the numbers a bit “to make it harder for vote manipulation bots to see if they’re working” or something like that too. It makes the upvote percentage almost useless.
That was the official line, which was classic doublespeak, because it’s technically true, but also total bullshit. Even with the vote fuzzing it was easy to tell when a post or comment was heavily downvoted. Advertisers and astroturfers hated this, because it meant that when users recognized their posts as trash and voted accordingly, it was that much harder to make them seem organic and innocent. When reddit obscured the vote tallies, it also destroyed transparency and made it easier for bad actors to game the karma system to push their own agenda.