"I've thought about how to solve this problem, and I think the best solution is votes/time since the comment was posted. New comments will immediately appear at

"I've thought about how to solve this problem, and I think the best solution is votes/time since the comment was posted. New comments will immediately appear at the top, since they have infinite vote/time ratio. But they will quickly fall to their correct ranking. " The traditional solution to this problem is wilson score intervals. The real problem there is that most sites that use them only use one part of the bound, instead of using both. Ideally, you use the lower bound to scale how good something is, and the upper bound to determine with what priority you show it order to get more votes on it to determine better bounds to be more confident of your lower bound. This is what Google Moderator did, and pretty much never had these problems as a result. (Is it perfect? No. You need a good place/way to show things for voting. But assuming you get that, it works very well in practice). If you only use the lower bound, you get systems where you only ever become more confident in the scores of the things that show up first (like is happening here).