You could try probabilistically showing pending comments to users who moderate. Then those comments will only be shown to a random sampling of others until they

You could try probabilistically showing pending comments to users who moderate. Then those comments will only be shown to a random sampling of others until they have been promoted. I've always wanted to build an algorithm like that! I've often wondered if this could be applied to the homepage too: rather than relegating submissions to the "/new" URL, show them to a random subset of users right on the homepage until they've hit a threshold; then show them to everyone.