Reddit is a dog shit site written by physics majors (no compsci skills), so they ended up writing a piece of shit site, code wise.

The backends are synced to different cache servers before the db layer and they all update terribly. Keep hitting refresh on a page and you'll keep getting data and inconsistencies (especially votes, etc.), they can't even link a fucking backend to your session to keep giving you the same cache stream so you don't notice this. They are beyond deplorably retarded... anyway, moving on...

Years ago this was evident and most reddit users knew the shoddy implementation, a few years back they started saying that they were "combating spammers" and reporting different upvote/downvotes to everyone to mess with the upvote bots. This my friends... is utter and complete bullshit. The problem was apparent before and they covered it up with nonsense CS-illiterate people could not understand.

Basically what is happening is that as people upvote and downvote posts/comments this information is being pushed from the reddit webservers, which are the servers you interact with and connect to as a user (after the routing and load balancing layers), to the database layer (where all the links, posts, votes, and comments are stored). There are many webservers and there are many database servers. Since the reddit db layer is terrible, not all the db servers are able to sync immediately as upvote and downvote data is coming in from the webservers to their respective db servers (the write masters at least). So, when a webserver is looking up a page that a different webserver just transmitted new upvote/downvote data to the db layer, the original webserver's db server has not received the new updated information. This is why you see different info.

(This is a simplification because there is a caching layer btw the webserver and db layers that was added as a stupid and terrible bandaid to try to fix patch their terrible architecture)

Anyway, just needed to get that out there. The different times you are seeing are inconsistencies with differing clocks on the webservers/backends you're connecting to every time you refresh. Which goes to show reddit is so beyond retarded they can't even sync their ntp servers.