Bad headline given the use case which not a currency issue but rather how to feature quality content that is not as popular: * Discovery: Good but unpopular co

Bad headline given the use case which not a currency issue but rather how to feature quality content that is not as popular: * Discovery: Good but unpopular content is being buried by popular content * The noise makers are the taste makers: What is popular is being decided by the most active users * Popular begets more popular: Rankings that are based on popularity only reinforces the popularity of top-ranked items. Some communities may decide that this is not a problem and therefore ranking content by Likes works as is. However if you want to address those issues, then yes, rationing the available Likes is one way to approach it. You could also weight the ranking formulas by percentage of Likes per user (ie. users that have older accounts and give out less Likes overall are weighted differently)