I think there may well be some sort of “holding pen” system. But we don’t have the info. We only know what the “raw” ranking formula is. But the actual rankings

I think there may well be some sort of “holding pen” system. But we don’t have the info. We only know what the “raw” ranking formula is. But the actual rankings differ significantly from what the raw ranking formula says. You can actually see the difference in charts on our site. For example: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=35183317 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=35183317 We have noticed that the “raw” rank (black line) will sometimes initially put a story on page 1, while it still has no the actual rank (orange line). But then sometimes the orange line suddenly jumps up. This seems to support the “holding pen” hypothesis.