The 'constant rate' allegation is serious, but given the number of 'votes' involved if there is any truth to the claim it should be trivial to suss out. Humans suck at cheating statistics. Even someone with a good model for human behavior in these circumstances isn't going to have a good handle on faking all the metrics picked up by third party web analytics in conjunction with server logs.
Yeah, I'm very curious too. If the Webby Awards people ever respond to my request for them to inspect the data, I'll follow this up with any findings they share.
Not a great motivator for 'random' people.
The 'constant rate' allegation is serious, but given the number of 'votes' involved if there is any truth to the claim it should be trivial to suss out. Humans suck at cheating statistics. Even someone with a good model for human behavior in these circumstances isn't going to have a good handle on faking all the metrics picked up by third party web analytics in conjunction with server logs.
So, let's see what comes out of this.