Shout out to GA:

A cursory examination of Planet Maemo and the Maemo news page appears to bear out my suspicions: a neutral rating (no votes at all) is enough to keep an article off of the main page (as long as there are articles with hearts, but then, if there were none at all the point is moot anyway). I wanted to confirm that date/Time was not a prominently contributing factor and a post by Thoughtfix did confirm it.

So for now I would like to blog next about a best practice where voting is concerned, but I don't have enough info on the Maemo system's mechanics to say for sure that I'm correct. So... are you or someone you know able to provide that verification?

My goal here is to let people know this is actually a 3 state system and not just binary as I mistakenly said previously (I should have known better... I blame a headache).