AHA! Let's just cancel out the double negative ("no" and "n't") and look what we uncover, in this former reddit admin's very own words: "the votes are manipulated"

> That's how english works. That's a double negative.

Exactly!

> That's a double positive.

Indeed!

Back when there were only 25 default subreddits and multireddits had just been launched, I tried to create a default multireddit. If I just included the top 25, the rankings would match the logged out view perfectly. But if I added /r/blog and /r/announcements they would appear in different places. I think they usually ended up at a slightly lower rank, but they also stuck around in the top 50 much longer, with week old posts often being inserted into the middle of the rankings.

But if your front page is 25 links long (the default) and has 25 subreddits, I imagine adding 2 more means that you need to show 27 subreddits in 25 links, so you hit some edge-case there where things need to be laid out again.

The way this probably works is that we pick 25 subreddits at random (and cache that random choice for a while), some of which may have no qualifying submissions. So you may end up with 2 /r/funny posts, even though you had 27 subreddits for 25 links.

Or at least that's how it used to work. I know this bit has changed but I don't know what the new way is

Could you then explain the, pretty much on the dot, massive score changes every 2 hours? That was even more noticeable when the downvotes were shown - although they were 'fake' the final score, which is according to the FAQ correct, was changed.

I noticed this when I created a simple graphing script, you can see example graph of what I'm talking about here: https://github.com/Nikola-K/reddit-thread-graph#example

You can see that on any popular thread until the score is "normalized" around 3k points.