I've got a better one for you: I submitted an article yesterday. Quickly 3 or 4 people upvoted it -- it was basically an "Ask HN" piece. Nothing special.<p>But the odd thing was that even though the score increased dramatically from 1 to 5 in just 10-15 minutes, the ranking didn't change that much. Used to be that an increase of that much would get you near the top of the front page, if even for a little bit.<p>I'm not complaining, just figured somebody somewhere was tinkering or it was some kind of effect of karma inflation. However it does bring up an interesting point about UI design and large groups of users -- any non-obvious new system behavior can easily be interpreted in lots of ways, some of which aren't so flattering to the board owners.<p>FWIW, I've always thought this behavior was a bug. If I thought my vote was being taken and then returned to me at random times depending on the "smarts" of the system without notifying me why, I'd be pretty mad. I understand that it's already happening with deep threads and the first time I stumbled across it I was so mad I was ready to just throw in the towel on HN.<p>Not exactly a happy user experience, but yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Just a better job of communicating would salve a lot of these hurt feelings, in my opinion.