Specifically, from looking at the code, it counts the most recent 50 votes on posts and the most recent 50 votes on comments for the calculation.
wjs018
joined 1 month ago
When you don't have too many votes cast, it doesn't take much to cause a big swing. There is a section in the code where it doesn't actually calculate the attitude until after 3 votes are cast, but perhaps that should be increased.
Attitude, like others have mentioned is given by:
(upvotes cast - downvotes cast) / (upvotes + downvotes)
If you want to see exactly how it is done, here is the code reference. Basically, it is just a number between -1 and 1 (-100% to 100%) based on the votes you have made. It can be different on different instances depending on what has federated to where. For example, on instances with downvotes disabled, everybody has a 100% attitude!
wjs018 - a contributor to piefed, mainly doing UI/UX stuff for the web interface rather than the api. I am not a dev by trade, instead I do biophysics, like at a lab bench in a lab coat and all that. My first foray into programming was when I was in grad school and I had to learn enough IDL and python to rewrite a bunch of IDL scripts into python so that any of us knew what the hell they did. Then, I changed the whole direction of my PhD thesis and didn't need any of that...however, I did stick with python as a bit of a hobby, and the rest is history.