thesixtyone.com, a social music site, has a clever way of dealing with this: You can "bump" a song, but it costs you "points," which you see a return on if the song becomes popular. It turns upward momentum into a currency instead of something tossed around in large amounts.

But that only exacerbates the problem. People will start to vote for what they think others will like instead of what they personally like.

But that's how the stock market works. :) Trying to do better than that is futile.

The stock market wouldn't work either if users of the products companies make would act like investors. Just imagine what they would buy :-)

Yeah, that's another solution. Problem is, it's unwieldy for news sites, since usually you're not submitting your own content.