Lol. Zen Master recommended checking out Joe_J's blog. It's a riot.
Just as a reference, if just averaging the raw votes for Love's Shepherd, it would currently have 8.32, while the site displays 7.18.
The algorithm itself isn't actually that hard to understand, but without knowing what all the votes were over the past 12 hours, you can't really know what a particular vote rating would do to a story's score.
Unless you vote a 1 or 10, the value used is completely subjective to what everyone else voted in the past 12 hours.
Like what someone else voted on someone else's story should matter. Do readers as a group give higher scores one day compared to another? Like does everyone give out more 10s on Christmas? I personally don't think so.
But its been this way for a long time now, and I don't see it changing.