To make this quantitative, there are some interesting studies that show the popularity of music depends largely on luck. Researchers built a music sharing site that showed the popularity of different downloads and found not surprisingly that people downloaded the popular songs more. The interesting part is they randomly showed different users different popularity rankings. The songs that became popular with one set of users weren't very correlated with the songs that became popular with another set of users - basically once a song randomly gets more popular, positive feedback sets in.
To summarize the abstract:
"Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible."
It would be interesting to test this with Hacker News, showing different users two different sets of comment rankings. This would show how much top-rated comments get voted up because they are popular versus voted up because they are "better".
To summarize the abstract:
"Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5762/854.short http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts08.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p...
It would be interesting to test this with Hacker News, showing different users two different sets of comment rankings. This would show how much top-rated comments get voted up because they are popular versus voted up because they are "better".