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Bugmaster comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Don't you technically need at least two bits ? There are three states: "downvoted", "upvoted", and "not voted at all".
One and a half if you can find a suitable compression algorithm. I wouldn't rule that out as a possibility but it may be counter-intuitive.
True, except you don't know how many people didn't vote (i.e. we don't keep track of that : a comment at 0 could as well have been read and voted as "0" by 0, 1, 10 or a hundred people and is the default state anyway.)(We similarly can't know if a comment is controversial, that is, how many upvotes and downvotes went into the aggregated score).
The system does keep track of how everyone voted, though; it needs to do that in order to render the thumbs up/down buttons as green or gray. wedrifid is right though; using suitable compression, you might be able to get away with less than two bits (in aggregate).