I see every once in a while a phenomenon that makes me wish that SO had a linkback mechanism, concretely to make a triple (SO_URL, HTTP_Referrer, Timestamp) part of the public data dump.
The reason is that the usual pattern of my answers' votes is:
- they get 95% of the votes over the first two days and then they linger on without an extra vote for months.
- they randomly get a single vote every now and then (Google hits one would presume.)
- they randomly get more than a single vote in a short time period (day or two) (Blog post one would presume, or going back to the active list, but it would be nice to be able to know for sure.)