It probably has to do with the speed of upvotes or percentage of upvotes per viewer. It pretty rapidly has gone to +17. There does seem to be some kind of "upvote recency" component to the algorithm. Older upvotes stories drift down and newer quickly upvoted stories drift up. I doubt there is a conspiracy (except for those employment posts that can't be replied to).
dang has noted they randomly push some stories into the bottom of the front page to give them a shot.
oh thank you! didn't know about this.
You could call it the "Sunday effect".
Why wouldn't you just call it the Saturday effect?
This happens routinely on weekdays too. Number of points is not indicative of something appearing on the frontpage. I don't know what is though, which makes me suspicious of hidden agendas.
I wouldn't call it "hidden".
The admins here do promote stories to the front page when they want it to get more views.
Views are calculated into front-paging?
I thought I read somewhere that successful front-pagers have an increased weight to their posts being frontpaged.
And "rate of upvotes" matters a lot. So maybe these 3 upvotes were given within a second of each other.. ?