1. Check out the up and down votes on reddit! 158,753 up votes 152,631 down votes with a net difference of 6k or so positive. That's crazy! Are those partisan lines or something? Why wouldn't everyone on reddit be excited to see the president?
2. Why has this had such low rank on HN given the number of votes? It had 200+ in the first hour and never seemed to get in the top 3.
1. Reddit doesn't show the real numbers, like mentioned. If a post is getting a lot of upvotes, it will register a handful of downvotes as well. If you look through the highest ranking posts of all time, you'll notice most of them are quite old. Some time ago, they implemented an algorithm to keep votes from getting out of control; as the number of upvotes gets higher, the number of downvotes does as well. This is to normalize it at a certain level of votes. There's a ceiling that the votes practically cannot get above.
2. HN doesn't allow downvotes but it does allow you to flag a post. I don't know the algorithm for this, but it's possible people were flagging this post.
For 1, Reddit has a fuzzing algorithm on large vote counts, so voting bots don't know how much influence they're having. Refresh the page and you'd probably see a different number of up and down, but the same "net".
2. Why has this had such low rank on HN given the number of votes? It had 200+ in the first hour and never seemed to get in the top 3.