Why spend evaluation resources on outsiders? Everyone wants to know who is exactly first second etc, after #10 it’s do your own evaluation if this is important to you.
Thus, we have this inequality.
Basically get in early and get a high rank and you are usually going to 'win'. Now it does not work all the time. But it had a very high success rate. I probably should have studied it a bit more. My theory is any stack ranking algorithm is susceptible to it. I also suspect it works decently well due to the way people will create puppet accounts to up rank things on different platforms. But you know, need numbers to back that up...
drcongo recently referenced something I sort of wish I had time to build: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43843116 And/or could just go somewhere to use, which is a system where an upvote doesn't mean "everybody needs to see this more" but instead means "I want to see more of this user's comments", and downvotes mean the corresponding opposite. It's more computationally difficult but would create an interestingly different community, especially as further elaborations were built on that. One of the differences would be to mitigate the first-mover advantage in conversations. Instead of it winning you more karma if it appeals to the general public of the relevant site, what it would instead do is expose you to more people. That would produce more upvotes and downvotes in general but wouldn't necessarily impact visibility in the same way.