I feel a little gratified, because the /r/circlebroke post you linked to has a link at the bottom to my /r/ideasfortheadmins post. In general, the problem of p

I feel a little gratified, because the /r/circlebroke post you linked to has a link at the bottom to my /r/ideasfortheadmins post. In general, the problem of path dependency based on highly-weighted initial changes can be modeled by the Polya Urn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polya_urn_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polya_urn_model Over at kuro5hin (which in general should not be used as a model for successfully running an online community) rusty addressed the problem of initial votes being too influential by hiding the score of a comment until it had received 6 votes. reddit also allows subreddit mods to hide comment scores for a predetermined period of time, if they choose to: http://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1dd0xw/moderators_new_subreddit_feature_comment_scores/ http://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1dd0xw/moderators_n... These solutions are good in general, but are still problematic when faced with sybil attacks / voting circles.