The marketplace of ideas relies on everyone in it being some kind of purely rational actor who seeks truth. In reality, it can be to your benefit to believe som

The marketplace of ideas relies on everyone in it being some kind of purely rational actor who seeks truth. In reality, it can be to your benefit to believe something that isn't true, to get an out-group punished and yourself elevated. People will change what they believe or what they say the believe based on who is in the room with them. You have incentives to believe in certain things. This is going to affect what you choose to post yourself as well as what you upvote. Attempting to measure, in real time, the validity or the popularity of an idea provides a perverse incentive. I honestly believe there is simply no way to do this. Maybe the closest is by returning comments in random order on every load, and hiding all likes/upvotes on any comment for a set period of time. Even returning comments chronologically gives precedence to ideas that occur often, even if they are posted by the same user. This is however not a "fun game" and unlikely to be successful as a site. Even with this, I think you would still end up with sites having a definite lean one way or another on certain issues, as users mentally total up they kinds of comments that reached the top after the results were revealed and users self-select into or out of the site. So probably the "best" way is just random, always, and never show any rankings at all. People are free to rank the comments mentally based on their own incomplete information, potentially poor reasoning skills, and their own incentives. But that's the best you can do.