Couldn't that just be attributed to a log that is compacted to a count? I would imagine a system like change.org needs to handle plenty of people all of a sudde

Couldn't that just be attributed to a log that is compacted to a count? I would imagine a system like change.org needs to handle plenty of people all of a sudden signing that a append-only log would be sufficient for. As for the randomness I'd leave that up to the randomness of people signing up. Of course I could be entirely wrong but I can see if a technical reason why it wouldn't go up cleanly, similar to YouTube views, they're not realtime.