If you search for the most upvoted Reddit posts, you will find a dozen lists and no two of them agree on what number one is. The most upvoted Reddit posts of all time are the submissions with the highest net scores in Reddit's history, topped by a GameStop billboard photo from r/wallstreetbets that peaked near 490,000 upvotes in January 2021. This article gives you the verified list, explains why every other ranking contradicts itself, and breaks down the patterns that actually repeat across record posts, at a scale you can use.
We run Reddit engagement campaigns every day, so we care less about trivia and more about what the leaderboard teaches. Both are below.
Key takeaways
- The record holder is the r/wallstreetbets "Times Square right now" GameStop billboard post at roughly 490,000 upvotes, though its image is now dead, which is why some lists skip it.
- Rankings disagree because Reddit fuzzes scores, recalculated all displayed counts in December 2016, and archives old posts, freezing their votes.
- You can verify the live leaderboard yourself in 20 seconds on old Reddit. Never trust a listicle snapshot, including this one.
- Almost the entire top of the leaderboard comes from 2017 to 2022. That is a platform-mechanics story, not a content-quality story.
- Record posts share six repeatable patterns, and each one translates down to the 300 to 3,000 upvote scale where most subreddits actually operate.
What Is the Most Upvoted Reddit Post of All Time?
The most upvoted Reddit post of all time is "Times Square right now" from r/wallstreetbets, a photo of a Times Square billboard reading "$GME GO BRRR" posted during the January 2021 GameStop short squeeze. It peaked at approximately 490,000 upvotes with a 99 percent upvote ratio.
There is a catch, and it explains a lot of the confusion in this niche. The post's image was hosted on Imgur, and the poster later deleted it by accident, a mistake the poster themselves documented in an r/TIFU thread that earned over 40,000 upvotes of its own. The record post still exists, but it displays a dead image, so many list writers quietly drop it and crown the runner-up instead: Rick Astley's 2020 r/pics photo of himself on his 1989 tour, sitting around 438,000 upvotes and still fully intact. Both answers are defensible. That is the first hint that "most upvoted" is a messier question than it looks, which we unpack below.
What Are the Most Upvoted Reddit Posts Ever?
The most upvoted Reddit posts ever are dominated by a handful of cultural flashpoints: the GameStop squeeze, Rick Astley's lockdown nostalgia photo, the "The Senate" Google-bombing campaign, and a small set of wholesome or activist moments from 2017 to 2021. Here is the corroborated list.
A note on methodology, because no competitor offers one: upvote counts fluctuate, so every figure below is approximate, cross-checked against multiple independent snapshots taken between 2022 and 2026. Posts we could not corroborate across at least two independent sources were left out rather than guessed at.
| # | Post | Subreddit | Approx. score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Times Square right now" ($GME GO BRRR billboard) | r/wallstreetbets | ~490K (image now deleted) |
| 2 | "I just took the best photo in human history" (Shrek reflected in a cat's eye) | r/pics | ~469K reported |
| 3 | Rick Astley's 1989 tour photo, posted by Rick Astley | r/pics | ~438K |
| 4 | "The Senate" Palpatine Google-bomb campaign | r/movies | ~350K (displayed 400K+ at peak) |
| 5 | Tiny frog taking a bath in a bottle cap | r/aww | ~310K to 340K depending on snapshot |
| 6 | NYC taxi driver excited about making the 2018 calendar | r/funny | ~305K |
| 7 | "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy" Sinclair anchor montage | r/videos | ~293K |
| 8 | Drone footage of blindfolded prisoners in Xinjiang | r/pics | ~278K |
| 9 | Veteran gamer shielding a new player, comic | r/gaming | ~269K |
| 10 | Private Internet Access newspaper ad calling out 50 senators | r/pics | ~258K |
| 11 | Barack Obama's presidential AMA | r/IAmA | ~216K |
| 12 | "Join the Battle for Net Neutrality" | r/books | ~180K |
Every score is a cross-checked approximation, not a ledger entry — Reddit deliberately fuzzes displayed counts, which is one reason no two rankings ever agree.
Honorable mentions: the Will Ferrell juggling edit in r/DunderMifflin at roughly 175,000, the r/place coordination threads from the 2022 canvas event, and "Guardians of the Front Page" in r/gifs, which held the all-time record for years before the modern scoring era pushed it down the table.
Rather than repeating twelve near-identical blurbs, it is more useful to see that these posts cluster into three groups.
Participation votes. The GameStop billboard, the net neutrality post, the Private Internet Access ad, and the Sinclair montage were not upvoted because the content was skillful. People upvoted to be counted. Each one turned the upvote button into a public statement during a live cultural fight, and the vote itself was the point.
Zero-context delight. The frog, the taxi driver, the gaming comic, and the cat's eye photo require no background knowledge, no subreddit fluency, and roughly two seconds of attention to enjoy. That matters mechanically: once a post reaches r/all, most of its audience is drive-by traffic with no context, and the content that survives that transition is content a stranger understands instantly. Our guide on how posts reach the Reddit front page covers that transition in detail.
The author was the story. Rick Astley posting his own photo, Obama answering questions live, the taxi passenger replying in the comments with the Mr. December detail. When the original poster is a participant rather than a broadcaster, the thread becomes an event, and people upvote events harder than they upvote content.
Why Does Every "Most Upvoted" List Show Different Numbers?
Every list disagrees because Reddit's displayed scores are not stable historical records. Four mechanics guarantee that any two snapshots of the leaderboard will conflict, which is why one ranking crowns the GameStop post, another crowns Rick Astley, and older articles still crown posts from 2016.
Vote fuzzing. Reddit states in its own help documentation that displayed scores are deliberately fuzzed as an anti-spam measure. The same post can show slightly different counts to different people at different times. Small disagreements between lists are baked into the platform.
The December 2016 recalculation. For most of Reddit's early history, displayed scores were artificially softened. In December 2016 Reddit's admins announced that posts would begin showing something much closer to true scores, and displayed counts jumped platform-wide overnight. This is why the pre-2017 era barely appears on the modern leaderboard: those posts competed under a lower displayed ceiling. Any list written before 2017 is describing a different scoring universe.
Archiving. Posts are archived after six months by default, which freezes voting. The leaderboard is therefore a museum: old entries cannot gain or lose ground, and new posts must outscore them within their own six-month window. Combined with the recalculation above, this stratifies the list into eras.
| Era | Scoring conditions | Result on the leaderboard |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-2017 | Softened displayed scores | Almost absent from the modern top list despite huge cultural moments |
| 2017 to 2019 | True scores shown, growing user base | The activism cluster: net neutrality, Sinclair, The Senate |
| 2020 to 2022 | Lockdown traffic peak plus GameStop | The structural summit: the top three all sit here or later |
| 2023 onward | Fragmented feeds, changed r/all distribution | Very few new entries crack the top despite record user counts |
Dead media and quiet substitutions. The number one post has a deleted image, so some writers drop it. Others copy older lists without checking. The result is a SERP full of confident, mutually exclusive rankings.
The fix takes 20 seconds and no listicle: open old.reddit.com, go to r/all, sort by Top, set the window to All Time, and read the live leaderboard yourself. We would rather you check our table than trust it, because the checking habit is the actual skill.
What Do the Most Upvoted Reddit Posts Have in Common?
The most upvoted Reddit posts share six patterns: the vote doubled as a statement, the content cost nothing to understand, the poster participated in the thread, the post lived in a massive community, it landed inside a cultural window, and it was overwhelmingly positive rather than divisive.
1. The upvote was a statement, not a rating. The biggest scores appear when upvoting means joining something: a market rebellion, a policy fight, a collective joke on Google. Content quality sets the floor. Identity sets the ceiling.
2. Zero comprehension cost. Every entry in the table is understandable by a logged-out stranger in seconds. Niche fluency wins subreddits. Instant legibility wins r/all.
3. OP presence. Threads where the poster shows up, answers, and adds detail consistently outperform fire-and-forget submissions. The comments are part of the product, a dynamic we break down in our Reddit engagement guide.
4. Mega-community electorates. Every record post lived in a community with tens of millions of subscribers or crossed into r/all early. A bigger electorate means a higher ceiling, full stop. The ranking math behind that, including why early votes count disproportionately, is covered in our Reddit algorithm guide.
5. A cultural window, not just good timing of day. Time-of-day timing matters for ordinary posts, and our data-backed guide covers it. But record posts rode multi-day cultural windows: a short squeeze, an election, a policy battle. The window multiplied everything else.
6. Positivity at the summit. Daily hot feeds reward friction, because arguments drive comments. The all-time summit is different: frogs, nostalgia, decency, and solidarity, most with upvote ratios near 99 percent. Divisive content spikes fast but caps low, because every downvote subtracts from the record.
What Is the Most Downvoted Comment on Reddit?
The most downvoted comment in Reddit history is EA's November 2017 reply in r/StarWarsBattlefront defending loot-box pricing, which told players the grind was intended to provide "a sense of pride and accomplishment." It fell to roughly minus 667,000, a mark later recognized by Guinness World Records.
It is the perfect mirror image of the patterns above. A corporation broadcast at a community mid-controversy, defended the indefensible, and never engaged. The community turned the downvote into the statement instead. Same mechanics, opposite direction.
How Do You Apply These Patterns at Normal Scale?
You apply record-post patterns by translating them down to the scale your subreddits actually operate at, because a 490,000 upvote outcome is a platform event, but the mechanics behind it work identically at 500 upvotes.
| Record-post pattern | At your scale (300 to 3,000 upvotes) |
|---|---|
| Upvote as statement | Post where your topic is already the live argument of the week, and take a clear position the community can endorse |
| Zero comprehension cost | Title and first screen must work for a stranger with no context; read it logged out before submitting |
| OP presence | Block out the first two hours to answer every early comment; the thread is the product |
| Big electorate | Pick the largest community where you are genuinely on-topic; check size and rules with the free subreddit stats checker |
| Cultural window | Ride news cycles in your niche within hours, not days |
| Positivity ceiling | For reach, aim for consensus emotion; save friction for comment-section debates |
Two free tools shortcut the research. Pull the highest-scoring titles from any target community with the free subreddit title scraper to see its revealed preferences, and find its live activity hours with the free best time to post tool.
The one variable you cannot study your way past is the first hour. Every post on the all-time list hit escape velocity almost immediately, because Reddit's ranking math makes early votes worth multiples of late ones. If your content is genuinely strong but your account has no reach yet, that first-hour gap is where campaigns die. It is exactly the gap our service closes: you can buy Reddit upvotes delivered from aged accounts in the critical early window, so good posts get the same fair hearing the record posts got organically. The full organic playbook lives in our guides on how to get upvotes on Reddit and how to go viral on Reddit.
One honest limit: no engagement service manufactures a 400,000 upvote post, and anyone promising that is selling fiction. What early momentum buys is entry into the visibility loop. The content still has to carry it from there.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most upvoted Reddit post of all time? The record holder is "Times Square right now" from r/wallstreetbets, a GameStop billboard photo from January 2021 that peaked near 490,000 upvotes. Because its image was later deleted, many lists instead crown Rick Astley's 1989 tour photo in r/pics, which sits around 438,000 upvotes and remains intact.
How many upvotes does the biggest Reddit post have? Roughly 490,000 at its peak, with a 99 percent upvote ratio. Displayed counts fluctuate because Reddit deliberately fuzzes scores as an anti-spam measure, so the exact number varies slightly between viewers and over time. Anything above 100,000 upvotes already places a post in Reddit's all-time elite tier.
Why do upvote counts change on old Reddit posts? Reddit fuzzes displayed scores, audits suspicious votes, and in December 2016 recalculated how scores were shown platform-wide, which raised counts overnight. Posts are also archived after six months by default, freezing their totals. Together these mechanics explain why no two "most upvoted" lists agree.
What is the most downvoted comment on Reddit? EA's November 2017 comment in r/StarWarsBattlefront defending loot-box progression, which dropped to roughly minus 667,000 and was recognized by Guinness World Records. It shows the same community mechanics as the most upvoted posts, just inverted: mid-controversy, the vote itself became the community's statement.
Can you still upvote the most upvoted Reddit posts? Usually not. Reddit archives posts after six months by default, which disables voting and comments, so the all-time leaderboard is largely frozen. Some communities have disabled archiving since Reddit made it optional, but the record posts accumulated their scores inside their original six-month voting window.
Which subreddits produce the most upvoted posts of all time? Massive general-audience communities dominate: r/pics, r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/movies, r/videos, plus event-driven ones like r/wallstreetbets and r/IAmA. A bigger subscriber base means a bigger voting electorate, which is why niche subreddits, whatever their quality, almost never appear on the all-time list.
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