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One thing that immediately jumped to my head when I saw the falloff towards 50 and then the jump right after 50 was simply visual prominence. I would guess that people naturally pay more attention to posts that appear at the top of the page, whether it's page 1, 2, or 3. There's also a blip of attention at the very bottom, since that post is also visually and conceptually distinct - everyone looks directly at it because it's the last one, so it gets more eyeballs and potentially quite a few people giving it a charity vote to "save" it from dropping to the next page. Meanwhile people scan more quickly over posts in the middle, perhaps (as I do) merely skimming over a couple words and the score, to see whether it merits moving my eyes over the whole line (because my time is that valuable).



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