[eru]

I'm not sure. I would have assumed that this naive algorithm is what they had at first, and what gave us the cesspool?

[fnordian_slip]

I'm not convinced that the current trend of positivity is not caused by bots, but I wouldn't be surprised if the old system was just based on engagement. Meaning that upvotes and downvotes would both push the comment up. This is not intuitive, but would fit with what we've been seeing for the last decade or so.

[eru]

Oh, some of the positivity is surely caused by bots.

And lots of the cesspool was not caused by bots.