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Just curious, why is there a required privilege (especially one as high as 1000) to view vote counts for a post? It's not like someone can mess up a post by just viewing the vote counts. Is it just to give people incentive to reach 1000?

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This is because it's "expensive" to view the vote count (in terms of running the query). The rep threshold limits the number of people requesting this data.

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    It probably also has the side effect of preventing newbies from getting caught up in trying to balance the vote count out at any level other than net positive. – Paul McMillan Nov 10 '10 at 1:21
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    This is a rather lame excuse, the time spent viewing some vote counts might as well be time spent executing another full page load, which I assume is far more "expensive". – user159834 Aug 8 '12 at 12:55
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    This seems bizarre to me. If you deliver the up and down count will the content of the page, there shouldn't be any "expense" to showing/hiding it. It seems to me that after a few years if this is still a database optimization problem it could have been fixed by now... given all the storage allocated to a single post, we can't store two ints with it? Really? – Aaron Bertrand Aug 8 '12 at 13:07
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    It should be noted that the link in this post refers to something else: showing the counts by default, not on demand. – user159834 Aug 8 '12 at 13:28
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    @Wesley right, but the answer implies that it's expensive to show in either case because of the underlying design. – Aaron Bertrand Aug 8 '12 at 13:28
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    -1, what the difference between current counter(voting) and number of down-voting and up-voting, it is the same. In worst case it is x2 resources than today. – toreator Jul 24 '13 at 8:47
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    @toreator The Score field of a post is denormalized, so it's available from the same query as retrieves the post's body, but the vote breakdown is rarely used so it's not worth denormalizing, so looking it up requires an addition query which (potentially) touches many more rows. – Jeremy Banks Oct 16 '13 at 0:23

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