On: Tell HN: Check out HNTrends.com

[joshu]

Why would you plot rank over time instead of actual votes?

Rank shows strictly less information.

[mhansen → joshu]

Less information, true. However, you can't downvote submissions, so the graph will be rather boring. Just a ton of upwardly sloping lines, some sloping upwards faster than others

[spectre → mhansen]

You could show the rate of voting instead of number of votes.

[natrius → spectre]

I'd guess that wouldn't be much different from the rank.

[atas → joshu]

I think rank is actually more interesting. It shows how much "visible" is an item, i.e. its potential/relative popularity along with its current one.

[joshu → atas]

You could draw a window around the visible items. It would show off relative popularity and rate of change as well.