I've seen some people speculate about Special Sauce. Here's what the source code says.
In short: Each site is assigned a score from 0-100. "Special Sauce" lists sites by descending score. Followers, views, likes, profile comments, and being featured all factor into the initial score. In addition, penalties are applied for brand new sites, being blocked a lot, and extremely high API calls. Finally, scores decrease over time since the last site update.
As a new user who joined after this roll out it feels a little weird to see this grading system when I came here to just browse and organically find fun sites.
well, the idea is to have a more holistic front page than just most followers or most views. but you can always set it to random to get true variety! try not to worry about page rankings so much. it's healthier that way.
¡HOWA! :3
¡HOWA!