Similar to how votes are hidden from newer users in online communities like Hacker News or Lobsters, I think we might benefit from hiding vote counts across all list types except ‘Completed’ to avoid drive-by me-too voting.

We’ve noticed anecdotally that the items at the very top of the list attract most of the votes, and I suspect part of this is a sort of “oh yeah I know that one, good idea” mentality. This means the most popular keep getting more popular, and those suggestions further down languish somewhat.

As part of the vote-hiding functionality, to further stop this behaviour, I think I’d lightly reorder suggestions so that those at the top are not always the same. Probably this needs to be no more complicated than “shuffle the top ~12 into random order”.

Once a user has voted once or twice, or perhaps x days after they first log in, show them vote counts again.

Thoughts?