How to create a fair voting system for a feature request database?

Question

On my product website, I'd like a public feature request database. Users can vote on feature requests by upvoting. People can vote on as many features as they like.

The problem is, there are around 100 feature requests already so it would be a fairly large list.

One solution would be to order the feature requests by number of votes. This seems sensible and provides the user with some guidance on the stuff that's probably important. However, this introduces a bias: The items at the top will be the most visible, and will tend to get even more votes; whereas items at the bottom will not be seen by most.

How can I avoid that bias when ordering the list by number of votes? Would a downvote-button help?

Answer 1

Using the down-vote will not remove the bias. Also in your case, you want the users to vote for the features which they like only.

I think the features should appear randomly regardless of the number of voting. It would be nicer if you give the user the ability to show them sorted by the number of votes.

To solve the problem of long list of features, you can use the classic paging approach.