Scoreboard Gazing

One of the addictive things about this Radio infrastructure is the referers and rankings pages. I got an endorphin rush yesterday watching my hits rise to second place yesterday as the Scripting News links propogated out across the ‘sphere. Today I seem to have settled back to about No. 5 or 6, with 6 also being my rank in the all-time stats so far.
I suppose that success breeds success, as new readers see the recently updated pages or look at the most-read list and follow those top links. I’ve wondered with Slashdot or Nuke type sites when you list the most popular articles, are you just reinforcing the trend and perhaps burying something that ought to be popular but hasn’t crossed the event horizon?