Why don't you think your votes are counting? The rank algorithm for posts/comments doesn't have a straight correlation between the # of votes, and placement on the page like Stackoverflow.com or something. It takes how old the post/comment is, coupled with it's growth/momentum (i.e. how many replies/votes a comment has had in the near past), and finally the raw vote count. Couple this with the fact that you can't see how many upvotes other posts/comments have, and it's easy to see how your vote may seem to not count for anything.

Disclaimer: I don't know for sure how the algorithm works, this is just my guess from what I've seen.

Because when I vote on something it's not instantly incremented (like everyone else I know) and if I return to something 30 minutes later, it still hasn't changed. It used to be in real time. It hasn't worked in 2-3 months, I figured it was caching or something. But it appears its not...

Why was the sibling comment here downvoted? Seems like a reasonable question, I was wondering the same thing?

It's incorrect, you can see vote count for articles. I don't know why it was so viciously downvoted though.

I don't know if that is the case, but if you vote on a post, refresh the page, and it is not up by one, then you are in trouble. Try again, as Hacker News is not eventual consistent, and sometimes it doesn't record upvotes.

For comments: you can see if your upvotes are being counted by looking into the user's karma. You can't give lots of karma to one user though. After a few upvotes to a single user, the system will stop recording them. I guess this is a way to prevent karma inflation, and a group of friends cheating themselves into lots of karma.

Thats exactly what happens. I vote and nothing happens. Refresh the page, no change. If it was just today I'd say no big deal. But this has been happening for at least 2 or 3 months now. I've been an active member for a long time, I'd love to continue being one...

To be clear: Does the vote arrow disappear after you click it (and stay disappeared on reloading)?

You may have fallen afoul of the voting ring detection scheme.

Any idea how to get reset? I'm sure I've voted on a few things for friends over the years. But I would hardly call it a voting ring.

I honestly have no idea, but I get the impression that the voting ring scheme isn't intended to be too harsh. Try giving and getting a few upvotes unrelated to your friends?

Perhaps (and take this with your grain of salt) you're voting on comments and posts that aren't actually popular with the rest of the users. If you're upvoting comments that other people ignore or downvote, then it would seem to you like your votes are always ignored since the posts and comments end up in the bottom.

Again, only a theory, I mean nothing by it.

Not the case. I can go upvote a brand new post thats only a minute old and my vote wont be counted.

Probably your votes do count, but you don't see the results immediately because the site uses caching extensively.

At least your post this time get upvoted.

We get to look into the source code to see what is really happening.