No need for rigging the system, few simple rules and many individual actions can produce complex behaviors. New queue on reddit moves very fast - currently the

No need for rigging the system, few simple rules and many individual actions can produce complex behaviors. New queue on reddit moves very fast - currently the oldest item is just about 7 minutes old. It's very easy to go unnoticed by target audience (people who would upvote the submission) in such short time window. Multiple submissions mean post has higher chance to get noticed. Eventual downvotes come from people who want to decrease competition for their own submissions, giving them extra few minutes in new queue. Also people may check submission queues of familiar users because they like their submissions, thus increasing chances of such submissions being noticed. Similar thing already started to happen here on HN. Even with new queue being much longer (at about 1 hour) there are multiplicities. Many times the same post (though not necessarily the same url) gets submitted multiple times and only later submissions get promoted to the frontpage. Well, sometimes it even happens that in a span of few hours/days the same story appears on frontpage several times, with completely disjoint set of commenters not being aware of earlier discussions.