I'll give you a selfish (and self-promotional) example.
I just posted a review on HN of a really great startup book, Do More Faster: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019914
Now if 5 or 6 of you guys upvote it in the "golden hour" -- the initial hour after entry -- it hits the front page and 20x more people see it, creating a small bit of a cascade reaction. Depending on how many votes it gets in the first hour, there is a somewhat exponential relationship to the eventual total number of votes.
Small groups of people can have large impacts. Knowing this, I sent an email to a few of my friends telling them about my post after I wrote it.
I know to do this because I've been on HN for a while. A voting ring is one thing (and bad), but simply knowing how to work the site is something else. That's the difference between cheating and just making the right moves at the right time. There are a few folks that like my writing, and pointing out to them that I posted something is in both of our best interests. So I think I'm okay doing this.
All sites are like this -- small numbers control larger numbers. There's a lot of theory, and I've read a lot of articles that almost describe what we're talking about, but my experiences with HN was I just had to spend time here and get to know folks.
I can't believe that there aren't shortcuts, but from where I'm sitting not many people are sharing them. And if you think about it, that's probably a good thing. If there were a magic formula, everybody would use it and it would stop working. Then there would be some new magic formula.
No easy answers, but I sure would like some more help on how the things I've learned at HN apply to other places like kickstarter.