That means that the Hot Subjects Lists and the Hot Stocktalk that is on the Home page of SI, were not functioning for a long time and were in error most of the time. That means that if some of the threads on SI were on those hot lists in the #1 spot for really long periods of time, says even years, they really were not #1, the system just had problems and they were stuck in the #1 spot accidently.
It's extremely unlikely that any thread could stay right at the top of the hot list without fail every single day. But possible if the algorithm is also taking into account just how active the thread is.
The way it was originally written, it only measured the *increase* in posting/bookmarking activity compared to what it was in the previous 7 days. I don't know whether or not total bookmarks, total posts, new posts per day, and new bookmarks per day are taken into account now or, if so, how long it's been working that way, but I would think it would be valid to do so.
I take it you're not a programmer. If you were you'd understand just how unlikely it would be that that list is representing anything but the results of crunching data from the site itself.
The programmers don't care about such things as popularity of threads or posters. What they care about is writing an algorithm to crunch millions of rows of data and produce a summarized output. The kind of manipulation you suggest would need to be done by a programmer, which, to me, is the most solid reason to believe no manipulation is taking place.
Unfortunately, the only way someone can really prove for themselves whether the output is being manipulated is to write a similar program themselves and see if it produces the same output.
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