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The reason those early articles got so many points is that the decay function was broken initially. Instead of accelerating downward off the frontpage with age, the velocity of stories' fall actually decreased. Because of this bug some of those stories stayed on the frontpage racking up votes for 4 days.

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Looking at old comments[1], though, indicates that the overall volume of karma flow was much higher in the early days. Of course, it could be that the bug-driven hyperkarma on posts led users to be more generous with karma on comments.

[1] In particular, the feature request thread.

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