Oh, you missed the old daily rewards by 10 days. We used to reward the best stackers daily.
Stackers rank higher if they contribute to the site by either a) creating good content or b) zapping good content early
Good content is content that hits the front page and was zapped by many stackers.1 The sat amount has some weight but it's not linear per stacker: if 10 stackers zap 100 sats each the content ranks higher than if one stacker zaps 1000 sats even though it's the same sat amount in total.
Does this help?

Footnotes

  1. Can also be comments though, comments are also ranked in the same way in each post.
I see what you mean about 10 stackers zapping 100 versus 1 zapping 1000. Just weird to go from nothing to 16 to 38.
reply
21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 10 Mar
It's the way the current day is added to the monthly score. If it's early in the day, it's not very competitive so on a relative basis you're high value. As more people start gaining value it "normalizes" everyone's score for the day.
reply
Understood, and since I'm UTC+8, "day" means night
reply