I think it would be interesting to use a market based mechanism for voting, where placing an upvote costs a small fee. The fee price increases as more upvotes are placed, and you can always un-place your upvote to get a refund at the current market price.

This means accounts that identify popular content before others do can make a profit by buying upvotes at a low price, and selling them high.

This doesn’t stop content from popular accounts from being upvoted a lot, but it does encourage people to search for otherwise overlooked high quality content - to your point, the fat tail.

https://ethresear.ch/t/better-curation-via-inversely-coupled...