You're right, the problem is especially acute for story submission.
Once an article is on the frontpage, it is likely to stay there. People are much more likely to upvote a frontpage article than something in new, simply because they are far more likely to look at the frontpage.
What you really want is to estimate the probably that a reader will click and/or upvote a link, not the total number of clicks/upvotes. You might also want to discount this by time, but this discounting might not be necessary---there might be a natural decay in the probability, particularly if you compute a moving average.
If you'd like my feedback about how to model this, feel free to email me. I'm happy to provide you with a more concrete methodology.
Once an article is on the frontpage, it is likely to stay there. People are much more likely to upvote a frontpage article than something in new, simply because they are far more likely to look at the frontpage.
What you really want is to estimate the probably that a reader will click and/or upvote a link, not the total number of clicks/upvotes. You might also want to discount this by time, but this discounting might not be necessary---there might be a natural decay in the probability, particularly if you compute a moving average.
If you'd like my feedback about how to model this, feel free to email me. I'm happy to provide you with a more concrete methodology.