How confident can you be that voting percentages found through a neat hack can be reliable? If the percentages were taken down, the Webby admins could have been doing anything during that period, under the assumption that those percentages wouldn't be seen (and therefor didn't need to be accurate).
Here's an alternate explanation to the events observed: The Webby admins started removing what they considered to be fraudulent votes during the blackout period. Most of these removed votes came from PadMapper and Zillow, which increased (linearly) Apartment List's percentage.
Full disclosure: I have no dog in this fight. I haven't used any of the services mentioned, and I've only really heard of Zillow.
Yeah, that's possible too. I ruled that out because they weren't going to announce for 5 days, so they'd have time to analyze/tweak the data after the voting was finished, rather than messing with the live data. Their tweak just removed a bit of data from the page, doubtful it was significantly different logic-wise. Even if Zillow and PadMapper were doing nefarious things, it's unlikely that they would have the same proportion of fraudulent votes while AL had far less, though - that would require coordination between PM and Zillow or some outside factor that would cause us to naturally cheat the same amount.
Here's an alternate explanation to the events observed: The Webby admins started removing what they considered to be fraudulent votes during the blackout period. Most of these removed votes came from PadMapper and Zillow, which increased (linearly) Apartment List's percentage.
Full disclosure: I have no dog in this fight. I haven't used any of the services mentioned, and I've only really heard of Zillow.