Eureka!
I just figured something out. Here's the question that was bugging me: I'd upvote a post that already showed a high value... only to see that value go down, sometimes by a few dollars. What? My upvote hurt the post?
It turns out the reason for the decrease in value had nothing to do with me, for you see, I am but a lowly minnow...
What really happened is that the whale who upvoted that post before I did got happy upvoting some other posts, and by doing so, reduced the value of his or her vote for each individual post. It might have been one whale, or several, but the more they vote, the less each vote is worth.
So now I better understand the big deal about "catching a whale." You don't just want that whale's vote. You also hope the whale doesn't spread his or her vote around too much, so that your own piece of the voting pie doesn't shrink too much.
@wiser, so THAT'S what that was...Thanks for the observation. Don't know enough about the bots to comment, other than the one I've seen, cheetah, that seems to be triggered if someone copy and pastes content from another website without any introducing commentary...
Yeah, I've seen Cheetah around, and from what I can tell he performs a valuable service. The other two commenters in this thread I'm pretty sure are bots, and not sure what their purpose is, other than to reward their owners handsomely if this post hits the jackpot.
Very good discovery. Thanks for sharing!
Wow! This post seems to have attracted the bot voters and commenters! I got something like 46 upvotes within seconds of publishing it. Not that I'm complaining or anything. It's just... fascinating. I mean, why this post in particular?
I noticed it too. I am glad you explained it. 1-up
Thanks :)
Interesting post. Well done :)