>>7170159cyclical thinking can lead to posts getting lots of upvotes, ie "people upvote good posts, therefore if a post has upvotes it's good and i should upvote it" and vice versa.
some subreddits (especially those prone towards debate) are afraid of a snowball effect where people are just going to agree with whoever has the most upvotes instead of whoever is making the best points. to they hide the number of votes on a post until it's X hours old so that new people coming into the thread have to decide the merit of a post and make their argument independent of the hivemind
>>7170178one can only hope