Q:

Peer pressure in voting for weekly photo competition photographs

In the weekly photo competition threads, my suggestion is to hide away the number of votes a pic has received till the competition is over.

A pic having 22 votes lands up in the top, and IMO forcing the new voter to think that since it has received 22 votes there must be something beautiful in it, hmmm! My point is that showing the number of votes may jeopardize the voter's decision.
When a new pic is added, it lands up on the bottom of the thread because of the default decreasing order of the voted photos and thus many people may not even notice the new pic.

Also, jumbling up the photos (rather than keeping them in the order they were posted) will give every photo an equal opportunity to be seen.
The number of votes can be displayed when the competition ends.

A:

I think if we had the ability to do some special contest stuff then I'd agree.  But we don't.  We're working within the confines of the system that was meant for something else.
There's a distinct possibility of that happening, but ultimately we're here for the community decide what it likes and pick one winner.  And frankly, I can't think of a time where I feel like the outcome has been drastically wrong - a picture winning that was really terrible but garnered the votes because it had votes.
If SE decides to throw some development time towards an enhancement for us for the contest - we've got a list of features a mile long that would be nice.  I'm just not sure we really need them - I think we're getting the outcome or very close to the outcome that would happen regardless.

Also, I'm just not sure that it really happens at all.  Look at Tractricious from @dpollit this week.  It was entered later than many other shots and started at 0 when several other where in double digits but its making its way up because its a great shot.

