For me the theoretical justification is to avoid rich-gets-richer multiplicative effects. That is, once you have many links, you have a high PageRank and you ar

For me the theoretical justification is to avoid rich-gets-richer multiplicative effects. That is, once you have many links, you have a high PageRank and you are much more likely to be linked and seen which self-perpetuates this problem. The same thing happens with journal publications. If you get a few citations early and you break through, you are likely to get many. Otherwise, near zero. Winner takes it all. For a deeper technical discussion see [1]. This effect tends to perpetuate weird biases. For example the Alzheimer's scam recently featured in HN [2]. HN tries to avoid this problem by giving some chances to new comments. AFAIK, Google or Google Scholar don't have a similar mechanism. [1] The Fundamentals of Heavy Tails : Properties, Emergence, and Estimation. Section 6.3. https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/book-05-11.pdf https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/book-05-1... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302